Today it’s Georgia, tomorrow they’ll attack Poland and who know what next.

I think you are entirely correct in principle Dato. While I don’t think Warsaw is at threat anytime soon, if this is permitted to stand by the international community, the territorial integrity of any neighboring state cannot be guaranteed.

Your broader point that the Russian mission in your country is driven by ulterior motives is also absolutely correct. The Russians have already changed their stated strategic objectives at least once and arguably twice, and now that they’re bombing economic interests, the notion that they are there to serve in a more powerful peacekeeping role is rapidly becoming untenable by anyone.

The good (and bad) news is that Russia historically has this problem of pressing its advantages too far. But as we see, the further they push, the stronger support will get behind Georgia.

Best wishes Dato. If you took a poll of Americans on which side they were on, you’d be hard pressed to find advocates for Russia. I saw one over on Democratic Underground yesterday –which is the most isolationist, anti-war forum on the web– and only 30% were Russian sympathizers. The will of the world is with you. That counts when it comes to a settlement, as it must.

I can see why my comment may have sounded like some “foggy bottom” equivocation but that was not what I wanted to get at. While Russia needs a little more prodding to arrive at a satisfactorily free state of affairs, it is an open society; the genie’s too much out of the bottle for anyone to revert the state to a Stalinist character. I’m sure we all appreciate the enormous wealth of human resources within Russia’s borders and the importance of Russia being a strong and stable state (you could argue it’s better than Pakistan for stability and openness). I was thinking of the huge implications of suddenly yanking all the multilateral ties we’ve established over many years. Maybe Saakashvili thought he could pull off a campaign like Slovenia’s battle for secession but the math just isn’t there, and neither is there such a preponderance of national will, if you remember Gamsakhurdia, Scheverdnadze and Saakashvili’s own harsh reactions to opposition demonstrations in the last year or so.

It’s just no good, however you try to square it. Georgia may prove to be closer to Lebanon than any other analogy we could draw from the nations of the world. I’ve known people from Russia and Georgia both and that’s why I’m so put off by the stupidity of the whole thing. It doesn’t help that both US presidential candidates have advisers who already wanted to antagonize Russia needlessly, even before Russia’s heavy hand was forced this weekend.

I’m not much for national masochism, but its equivocating like this that persuades me we really are among the most contemptible allies on Earth. It’s extraordinary that anyone ever agrees to join up with us in an alliance structure of any kind.

Georgia is nobody’s puppet; if anything, Saakashvili’s irresponsible plot seems to have been to provoke a predictably heavy-handed Russian retaliation and then play “poor me” to appeal for international military intervention, which he must realize by now is not coming.

As far as I can tell, the only real cause here is ethnocentric, much like the Balkan conflicts. There are no clean hands. The indiscriminate shelling and bombing by both sides is absolutely appalling. NATO should declare some minimum amount of time and a set of conditions for Tbilisi to meet before Georgia’s application for membership is even entertained again.