Slowly the gears turn, but Washington and Tbilisi’s positions inch further into concord by the minute. The infamous “unnamed senior US official,” behind all important news events of the last century has spoken:
A senior U.S. official says Russia has attacked areas of the former Soviet state that are far away from the separatist province of South Ossetia where the fighting has centered. The Bush administration also says the Russian military is striking civilian areas.
The official said Saturday that Moscow’s military response is disproportionate to the threat and Russia has stymied attempts at mediation aimed at arranging a cease-fire.
(AP)
That’s the embryo of a case that will go to Europe. Russia is in imminent danger of overreaching as badly as Georgia did.
I don’t like the “disproportionate to the threat” language. That shouldn’t be a metric to measure an attack on. It’s not that it was disproportionate to the threat, it’s that the threat was manufactured and the attack has no relation to it threat at all.