uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps 'i'm busy right now'
so rah-rah-rah- democracy
let's all be thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)"
But then I went looking for an old piece by Gwyn Dyer, in which he predicted a Russian military Renaissance, and found this one instead, in which he lays a verbal pounding on the Saakashvili regime. His conclusion:
There is no great moral issue here. What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya, but Georgia wasn't strong enough and South Ossetia had a bigger friend. There is no great strategic issue either: apart from a few pipeline routes, the whole Transcaucasus is of little importance to the rest of the world.
In six months' time, we probably won't even remember this foolish adventure.
A conclusion I think I disagree with. For one thing, Georgia has already called home about half the troops involved in its Iraq deployment, and its hard to see them maintaining their role in that country in the required numbers and with the required enthusiasm. Furthermore, the President's of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, all current or former contributors to the Multinational force in Iraq, issued a statement yesterday in which they asked NATO and the West to do more than "twitch a liberal titty"in response to the Russian invasion. So far they seem to have got little in the way of a concrete reply from Western leaders, and I imagine they're beginning to wonder just what their participation in the Western War Of Terror has bought them lately, and thinking that, going forward, maybe they won't be playing that game so much.
PS. National Post Uber Hawk Jonathon Kay has already thrown in the towel on behalf of the West, referring to Democracy as an "abstraction".
