There is no reason on God’s green earth why Russia and the United States should ever come to blows.
     On the other hand, in 1914 there was no reason why Russia, France and England should have to have gone to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. No reason except the insanity of power politics as practiced before the Great War.

     Russia has grievances against us that won’t go away. We blocked the Soviet expansion into Afghanistan by arming the Mujahideen. Once they learned how to shoot down Hind helicopters with Sparrow air-to-air missiles it was only a matter of time. We lured the Soviets into an arms race in the 1980’s they didn’t need to pursue. They didn’t have the cash to make it happen. When we tossed in the Star Wars chip, they had a breakdown of national will because they totally believed we could build a system that would negate their intercontinental rocket forces.
     Fooled ya! We’re still trying to make the damn thing work 20 years later. It was Ronald Reagan’s coup de grace to the back of the head of communism.

     Instead of propping up the USSR in gratitude...  for being liberated 60 years earlier, the ungrateful eastern European satellite nations gleefully quit the Warsaw Pact. Now they are mostly members of NATO and the European Union and out of Moscow’s grasp. The fact that the presidents of Poland and the Balkan nations dared travel to Tiblisi in the middle of the war, to proclaim solidarity in public with Georgia indicates enormous moral courage –and the knowledge that their security is America’s direct concern.
     Except for recently, with the fighting in Georgia, the Russian public regards the United States the Number One Enemy. Russians, from the man in the street to the ex-KGB operative who manipulates the president of Russia like a marionette—they all long for the days when Russia said “boo” and the United States and the West at large trembled.

     They long for the days when... in what they call the “near abroad” the leaders of nations on the Soviet periphery phoned Moscow to check before making a rest room visit. They don’t miss the respect the mighty Soviet Union generated; they miss the fear the USSR inspired. Bullying is a part of Russian life, families, neighborhoods, schools, even the armed forces, are riddled with bullies.
      Putin believes in the power of the bully. Disgusted after the terrorist attack on a grade school and subsequent massacre, Putin noted darkly that in this world, “The weak are to be beaten.”
      Georgia was made an example of because it was weak. Weakness inspires contempt in Russia. More than the so-called provocations in South Ossetia (really stirred up by the Russians themselves), more than “Pan-Slavic solidarity” with the Russian speakers in Georgia, Georgia’s major crime was to be weak. The Russian instinct, presented with the face of a homeless, weeping civilian, is to smash that contemptible face in with the heel of a jackboot, as Orwell said, forever and ever.

      Having beaten Georgia on the battlefield, Russia now wishes to humiliate her. Again and again. Today the Kremlin announced, “Georgian territorial integrity is a dead issue.”
     There are too many helpless people left uncrushed. Russia reserves the right to cross the border any time to smash them.
    We are flying in humanitarian supplies and, I hope weapons to rearm Georgian soldiers and militia. We are going to have to stand beside our friends when their noses are bloodied because they are our friends, and especially because they are weak. In this world, we Americans believe, the strong help the weak, whatever the risk.
     Russia is richer than ever in its history thanks to energy revenues. It has all the land it can use and all the raw materials. They simply aspire to smash a few faces from time to time as their God-given right and to scare the rest of the world.

     Which leads me to a question. Of the two, who is best suited to deal with Fascist Russia? Barack Obama, or John McClain? This is turning out to be much more important a presidential election than we had dreamed just 14 days ago.