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.

There is a very good reason why, over the centuries, Russia has been symbolized by the bear. A bear can appear to be a big, clumsy furry thing, almost cute, until it gets angry. Then it takes your head off with one swipe of its razor-sharp claws and tears you apart and eats you.
     The Russian bear apparently is also a cunning creature.
     Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister of Russia, does not like the independent nations on the border of Russia, especially when they resist the regional influence of Russia and especially if they align themselves with NATO and the West. The republic of Georgia is a prime example.
     Lately Georgia’s behavior has been intolerable to Putin and to the Kremlin clique that wants to firmly re-establish a Russian zone of influence around the borders of the country. Georgia’s application to join NATO –thus far refused—was the final straw.

     The Russians set an elaborate trap for the Georgians, using Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia as bait. Most of the people in South Ossetia are ethnic Russians and have Russian passports. More to the point, they had Russian Army peacekeepers in South Ossetia keeping the Ossetians separte from the Georgians. South Ossetians have been trying to break away from Georgia since 1990. The region has its own government and constitution, but it has asked in the past to be incorporated into the Russian Federation.  
     It’s unclear who fired the first shots back on August 1, but soon the sides were exchanging shellfire and a terrible idea occurred to President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia: Why not put this South Ossetia problem behind us once and for all and invade the province while the rest of the world is focused on the Olympics?
     Saakashvili gambled that the Russians were bluffing in the past when they said they would react with force against any Georgian move into South Ossetia. Saakashvili may have counted on U.S. intervention if the Russian’s weren’t bluffing.
     Early Friday morning, Georgia attacked South Ossetia, quickly seizing Tskhinvali, the capital city of the 70,000-person region. There was a great deal of bombing and shellfire and Ossetian civilians and military were killed and injured…and perhaps, also some Russians.

     Putin had the provocation he was hoping for. On that very same Friday (August 8) the Russian 58^th Army began to pour tanks across the border into South Ossetia and Russian jets began to hit Georgian forces in Tskhinvali. The attacks soon widened to include the two military airbases outside the Georgia capital city of Tiblisi. The Georgian cities of Gori and Kareli and the port cities of Poti and Batumi were also struck.
     Today, Russian armor is said to have severed the country’s only east-west highway by taking the city of Gori. Meanwhile, other Russian forces have driven deep into the west of the country, apparently in support of the breakaway region of Abkhazia.
     The Georgians have reportedly lost 30 tanks in the fighting and 150 combat dead. There are no reliable statistics for Russia’s losses although Georgia claims at least 10 jets were shot down. Russia admits two have been lost.
     The Russians are making an example of Georgia.

     The whole idea of this trap, into which the Georgians fell, was to punish Georgia and to demonstrate to other neighboring countries how ruthlessly Russia is prepared to act when provoked. Putin will carve up Georgia like a Christmas goose and there will be very little the Georgians can do about it. The United States will not intervene.

      The war will end in the next few days with Georgia agreeing to a signed cease-fire and withdrawal from South Ossetia without preconditions. If the Russians want to carve an independent Republic of Abkhazia off the western end of Georgia, they’ll do it.
     What’s left of Georgia will still be independent, --President Saakashvili might even keep his job-- but “guided” by the brotherly Russians, who will then be in effective control of the only Caspian Sea-Black Sea oil pipeline to Europe not running through Russian territory. This will give Putin enhanced energy blackmail power over Western Europe.
    Of course, “guided” by the fraternal advice of Moscow, Georgia will drop its bid to join NATO. The American advisors will probably be sent home –to be replaced by Russians.