In a WSJ Op-Ed entitled, “America Must Choose”, Russia’s foreign minister lays out an unrepentant case for his country’s attack on, and occupation of, her former satellite:
We started moving our troops in support of peacekeepers only on the second day of Georgia’s ruthless military assault. Yes, our military struck sites outside of South Ossetia. When the positions of your peacekeepers and the civilian population they have been mandated to protect are shelled, the sources of such attacks are legitimate targets.
Our military acted efficiently and professionally. It was an able ground operation that quickly achieved its very clear and legitimate objectives. It was very different, for example, from the U.S./NATO operation against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, when an air bombardment campaign ran out of military targets and degenerated into attacks on bridges, TV towers, passenger trains and other civilian sites, even hitting an embassy.
In this instance, Russia used force in full conformity with international law, its right of self-defense, and its obligations under the agreements with regard to this particular conflict.
Continuing occupation of Georgian territory outside of Abkhazia and South Ossetia? Only in order to prevent the Georgian president from making further mischief.
What’s to do now? Look away from the window. Forget Georgia. Do nothing in Poland. Get back in bed with the bear, and nobody you care about gets hurt.
It’s an offer we can’t refuse: Who’s tempted?
Poor Russia – they’re so uncomfortable without their buffer zones.
Putin in a tux, at the big banquet, with a baseball bat… we’re talking about teamwork here!
What to do?
Notwithstanding foreign minister Lavrov’s editorial hyperbole, he does make some points. And we likely will (and should) do what President Eisenhower did in 1956.
After perhaps encouraging the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Stalinist regime and Soviet policies, Eisenhower backed off.
Far from contemplating intervention in Hungary during the uprising, Eisenhower correctly worried instead about inflaming the situation, possibly to the point of general war with the Soviet Union.
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Well then, using their model, let’s go annex Nova Scotia. We can sell the beachfront real estate and reduce the debt!
re “Who’s tempted?”
Why all the usual suspects, o’course. 98% of all western europeans and about 50% or more of the American electorate.
b2
I’ll let Mr. Buchanan do the talking here:
” Ours is peculiarly American blindness. Under the Monroe Doctrine, foreign powers stay out of our hemisphere. Yet no other great power is permitted to have its sphere of influence. We bellow self righteously when foreigners funnel cash into our elections, yet intrude massively with tax dollars in the elections of other nations-to promote our religion of democracy.
As the British launched an imperial war in Iraq after their victory over the Ottoman Empire, we launched our war in Iraq after our victory over the Soviet Empire. Never before have our commitments been so numerous or so extensive. Yet our active duty forces have been reduced to one half of one percent of our population, one ninth the number under arms in 1945.
We are approaching what Walter Lippman called “foreign policy bankruptcy”. Our strategic assets, armaments, and allies cannot cover our strategic liabilities, our commitments to go to war on behalf of scores of nations from Central and South America, to the Baltic, to the Middle East, the gulf of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and Taiwan. Like the British before us, America has reached imperial overstretch. Either we double or treble our air, sea, and land forces or we start shedding commitments-or we are headed for an American Dien bien phu. If the US Army and Marine Corps are overstretched by insurgencies in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan, how can we police the rest of the planet?
We cannot. If two or three of the IOU’s we have handed out are called in, the bankruptcy of US foreign policy will {again} be exposed to the world.
America is as overextended as the British Empire of 1939. We have commitments to fight on behalf of nations that have nothing to do with our national interests, commitments we cannot honor if several were called in at once.”
Maybe I am a closet conservative after all………..
Capone had a brother who was a Federal Cop. (U.S. Marshall, IIRC)
Government bullies and free-lance bullies are much of a muchness, methinks.
In Russia these days, they may well be identical.
F-man –
Are you a troll, or do you really believe what you’re spouting?