Every war has enough misinterpreted, false or otherwise botched signals on BOTH sides to keep historians busy for centuries. You're ignoring the forest for the seedlings here. Putin has been bullying all the former Soviet Republics whom his gas lines pass through for years now. There was never any way to postpone this confrontation indefinitely; it's finally forced into the open what we in the West have long feared to admit: Germany, France, Italy's delicate dance with Putin will only screw them in the long term.

IIUC, per McFaul Germany's already changed its position on Ukraine's EU bid. This is good news. Putin's overreached, and this will backfire, big time, on him.

Tep: yes, but this is not the first time that what *we* tell someone is understood, tragically, and badly, in a totally different way by that someone.  April Glaspie's meeting with Saddam comes to mind - I don't think she goofed; I just think that she, and the State Department, had no idea how certain words (like "dispute") translate into Arabic and how those same words, even if correctly translated, will be viewed by Saddam.  Here, too, it seems as if the Georgians understood more than they should have ...

But I found the State Department "understanding" with the Russians particularly laughable - but then, their chief looked into Putin's eyes and saw his Swiss Bank- I mean, soul ... This is Keystone Kops playing at Great Power diplomacy.

Funny how "lapdogs" suddenly turn into roaring giants in your analyses ...

Not a "roaring giant", just not preventing Sweden Poland Lithuania Latvia Estonia Czech Hungary UK etc from allowing Putin to blackmail them any more. A schnauzer, not a lapdog.

One of the wierd and telling things about Russia- even if this seems lighthearted- is that is somehow manages to execute a pretty impressive war plan, and combined it with intelligent diplomatic measures (cozying up with Azerbijan and Turkey), and also seems to be at the forefront of cyber-warfare (cf Georgia and Estonia), while still being part of a country where its workers are eaten by bears.

www.news.com.au/.../0,23599,24074278-13762,00.html

That is to say- the center isn't even trying to hold.  

Still in peaceful dreams I see, the roads leads back to you [?]

I see that France and Russian presidents have agreed to a cease-fire deal as reported on CNN.  It may not be a great deal, but maybe it's a start.  Where was our president?  Oh, we don't count anymore.  We're now hold the sub-presidency of the Olympics.

Note that several European nations stood with Georgia during the announcement.  I tend to agree with Tep's assessment, that the long term prospect for a Russia behaving like this is not good.

But I agree with Jon in that our Georgian NATO strategy should be reexamined and better attention be paid to 'Putin's' Russia.

Bad move by Russia.If they press forward to regime change in Tiblisi they may get away with it. If not, we will draw a red line that will limit them going forward. Something should.

Robt P - did you see Biden's editorial in the FT? Some very intriguing threats there. WTO access is dead, ditto for lifting Jackson-Vanik; Joe notes that insurance rates for Sochi 2014 may be "prohibitively expensive", no doubt helped by some nudging upwards by the insurance industry's favorite senator. And note the clincher about "western financial institutions" being forced to start going after Putin and his thieves' illicit loot. Excellent.

www.ft.com/.../707f4ebe-686b-11dd-a4e5-0000779fd18c.html

Oh, look: another chicken, comin' home to roost!

Which one is this one? The Oil Addiction Puts Our 'Nads In Putin's Sling chicken? The Global Warming Frees Zillions Of Barrels Under Russian Ice chicken? The Unilateralism Undermines U.S. Diplomatic Influence chicken? The Iraq Distracts And Saps U.S. Power Creating Openings For Opportunistic Autocrats chicken? The Lie Down With Dogs Wake Up With Fleas chicken?

One thing for sure: Chicken shit ain't gonna be in short supply, seeing as damn near the whole flock like to be headed this way.

Astounding how quickly the CW on this bounces back and forth.  24 hours ago the US had got caught with its pants down, now it's Russia that has badly miscalculated.  My own guess is that Putin wanted to push the envelope on the US, move a ways toward Tblisi and see what we'd do.  High risk tactic, given all our hardware in that neighborhood these days.  In fact I'd guess further that he originally planned to pull this in the first year of the new President's term, but Saakashvili forced his hand.  I wonder what Putin thinks he found out.  I certainly hope the US has been showing a bit more sack behind the scenes than they have been in public.  

One other thing: I'm also astounded at how Kosovo has disappeared from all the news analyses around these events.  To my mind Kosovo's secession is a *huge* factor in all this, leading directly to the stepped-up Russian support for S Ossetia et al.  A lousy trade, if you ask me: the destablization of a democratic US ally of immense strategic importance -- and maybe all of Central Asia with it -- in exchange for a backward, ungovernable aid sink of no strategic value.  

Maybe the Chicken Little chicken?

"Maybe he's got a good plan but I just don't see why he passes up easy lay-ups on McCain"

Maybe because he _doesn't_ have a good plan, and is simply parroting Bush's mindless pablum. McCain's the adult here. Obama's way out of his depth, as is Bush.

Boneill, people are attacked and sometimes eaten by bears in this country, too. In fact, a bear came over to check out one of my colleagues in the field a week or two ago -- fortunately scared off by an additional person with a shotgun (or maybe by the helicopter)

Where was our President? Remember, he has a little problem when it comes to lecturing people about invading smaller countries on questionable pretenses.

While I agree that Bush has not inspired confidence with his public statements, it is not clear whether or not our government as a whole has been ineffective behind the scenes. Let's face it, he did not have a lot of options here,

boneill and Jeff: A woman was badly mauled by a bear while she was gardening near her front door in a suburb of Vancouver this week. (Ok, so It's not the US; but in most ways it's similar. And I bet the woman's glad to have guaranteed health care...)

Yesterday the Presidents of Poland, Ukraine, and of the Baltic States denounced the Russian invasion--from Tiblisi! It appears that we have a cease-fire short of regime-change and pipeline destruction, so it's not clear what the Russians have accomplished here besides screwing themselves. Thanks for the link, tep.

I need to say that loose associations between Russia's unprovoked aggression in Georgia, and the action by the US, as supported by the governments of most of the world's important democracies, to enforce the ceasefire and 16 other Chapter VII Resolutions in Iraq, are reprehensible.

Further, anyone thinking that we gave some kind of "green light" here, or even if we did that it played any role in this sorry episode, should ponder the amount of time it takes to prepare to move an army with hundreds of tanks across a mountain range like the Caucasus. This move was deliberately initiated by the Russians after months of careful planning, and the timing was theirs and only theirs.

RP,

It was hardly an army.

You continue to make up principles of international law on the fly to suit your version of reality.  And the comparison that most have been making is not between Iraq and Georgia but between Kosovo and Georgia, not a bad analogy at all.  The US under Bush, with you as a cheerleader, quite clearly picks and chooses its international law principles for its own convenience, and, surprise, others take notice.  The relevant point about Iraq is that, having trashed the authority of the UNSC by presuming to "enforce" its resolutions without its authorization, we make it rather more difficult to invoke international law when other nations violate it.

While we didn't "greenlight" anything, it is becoming quite clear that US missteps encouraged a bellicose position by Georgia and that are persistent indifference since the fall of the Soviet Union to any concerns expressed by Russia about any of our military moves has left us with little in the way of leverage and no friend there.  I know you don't like the real world much, RP, but it is the real world and actions have consequences, not necessarily or even usually those that might result if the world were effectively governed by a moral order.

The US needs to live in the real world if we are to be safe, not a fantasy world in which the forces of light and darkness contest and the virtuous win.

I certainly agree with your last paragraph, roi, and also with the fact that Kosovo is the operative analogy here. That action, taken without so much as a nod in the direction of the UN, had a direct impact on Russia's analysis, no doubt eventually its action in this situation, and in fact was identified at the time by many observers as likely to play out this way in Georgia.

I was responding to suggestions from others that there is some parallel between this Russian action and that of Coalition forces in Iraq to hold the regime there accountable for decades of invasions, genocide, support for terrorism, development and use of wmd's, and the defiance of seventeen Chapter VII Resolutions including the '91 ceasefire.

As far as I know, Georgia has a significantly different record. And if you think the Russians would be behaving any differently now if we had neglected to respond favorably to the entirely justified NATO applications of the ten former Warsaw Pact nations, I have a real world I'd like to introduce you to.

I will admit that I shared Kennan's concern about extending NATO's boundaries towards Russia, and I am pleased to admit that I was wrong, too cautious.  But, as rhubarbs pointed out, in the early going we at least made an effort to extend a hand toward Russia to mitigate the perception of provocation.  The key thing about admitting new members in my view is whether we have in fact both the will and the means effectively to join in their defense.  If we have both, then inclusion makes sense.  If we do not have both, the inclusion in NATO of countries we cannot and will not in fact defend undermines NATO itself.  So, no, I don't think that the expansion of NATO to Georgia would help because it is too distant from our strength, too vulnerable to Russia, and too meaningless to us for us to be willing to take serious risks in its defense.  Not now, not ever.  On the other hand, our willingness as time went on and there was no Russian response to NATO expansion to brush off its concerns -- about Kosovo, about missile defenses in eastern Europe, about the Iraq invasion -- and our failure to draw Russia into a web of mutual endeavors beyond inclusion in the G-8, for what little that is worth, were a big lost opportunity.

We will never know, of course, but I believe that a much more aggressive courtship of Russia over the past 20 years, a willingness to take its concerns seriously and compromise toward that end, an effort to treat Russia as a potential true ally and peer might have borne fruit.  If we had failed to do that for some serious purpose, it would at least be understandable, but the only purpose I discern was our triumphalist glee in being the only super-power left standing.  Now we are going to have to contend with a resurgent and not very friendly Russia.  It is not and is unlikely to become a threat equal to that posed by the Soviet Union, but, particularly in relation to Central Asia and even China, Russia would have been a good friend to have.  Had we built such a relationship with Russia, it is doubtful that it would had any motivation to invade Georgia, and certainly would, by any rational calculus, have had too much to lose and too little to gain to do so.  Might irrational, revanchist sentiment have led to the same outcome?  Possible, but not that likely.

Too bad.

RP, you might have interpreted my comment as suggesting that Russia's aggression was parallel to our invasion of Iraq, but I did not mean to draw that parallel. But the two are not perpendicular, either. There was a widespread feeling at the time that the US action was not justified, but nobody could do anything about it. Ask the Germans or the French, for example, what they thought about it. Or many of the citizens in the world's most important democracies.

My point is that support for the US invasion was not wide and deep around the world, even in most democracies. We could not even come close to getting a UNSC resolution supporting our action just prior to the war. And the claims made by the US to the public (domestic and the world) have not held up well against the facts on the ground. Not much of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN in March? 2003 turned out to be supported by fact. And whether or not the US invasion was *allowed* by past UNSC resolutions, it was not *required* by them.

The upshot of all this is that many people around the world think we were the aggressor, despite Saddam's awful record, and that perception harms our ability to speak out against other aggression. Like it or not.

"Speaking out against aggression" is basically worth shit. In Iraq, we acted against it even if with a  remarkable knack for doing everything the hard way. I am not particularly concerned about the opinions of people who don't understand why regime change in Iraq was a critical necessity. They generally fall into two categories--those who are patently ignorant of the history and principles involved; and those whose objectivity has been sacrificed to political bias, opportunism, and/or fashion. Although it's nice to be popular, this kind of public sentiment won't put bread on the table or divisions in the field.

It's indeed regrettable that we weren't able to do a better job with Russia over the last couple of decades, but the primary responsibility for how things turned out rests squarely with the Russians themselves. One of the key statistics I remember from the Yeltsin years was that a bit less than a billion dollars in aid went to Russia for rouble stabilization, etc. and during the same period, almost exactly the same amount was deposited in Swiss bank accounts by various Russian "leaders". We might have given better advice than what was on offer by Jeffrey Sachs, and perhaps stroked them more assiduously, but most of what went down in the 90's was Russians screwing other Russians. In the current situation, Georgia was going to get whacked whether we put missiles in Poland or not. When Russians are feeling strong, this is how they behave. Same as it ever was.

It was a risk to take the former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO, but it was clearly the right thing to do. Ditto Kosovo.  Unfortunately, in the real world, doing the right thing often has multiple consequences, some of which aren't good. Grownups understand that there are costs involved in doing anything. On balance, you still need to do the right thing when you can.

Doing the "right thing" needs to take account of the consequences.  The two cannot be considered separately.  I believe it was Aristotle who said that, in matters of private morality, intention is paramount; in matters of public morality, outcome is paramount.