It's called survival folks.

Using one-fourth of the world's daily oil supply is something that you describe as "survival?"

It is apparent that oil indepences and freedom are the flip side of the same coin. Nothing could damage our enemies -from Putin to Chavez, Iran and our open borders neighbors better than finding our own sources of energy. The case needs to be made before November and McCain had better get off his no ANWR/Kyoto mentality rapidly or it is Finlandization for the good old USA. It's called survival folks.

But Mr. Saakashvili has made some reckless bets in the past, which appear to be hurting him now. Georgia's troop commitment in Iraq, at 2,000, is the third highest, behind the U.S. and the U.K. If it were true that Georgia is a fledgling "democracy" in the Caucasus that is in danger of being overtaken by Russian aggressors, then why is Georgia sending 2,000 of its troops to Iraq? Georgia, a country of just 4.6 million people, surely needs all the military forces that it can muster up in order to defend itself from the Russian Bear that seeks to gobble it up. It just doesn't add up. Such a situation suggests that Saakashvili has made a huge mistake in thinking that the U.S. is going to respond to Russian "aggression" against Georgia.

The Polish Prime Minister is quoted this morning as saying they are now on the verge of signing the missile shield agreement with the US.

Good to see the first reaction of humanity to a threat is still unreasoning stupidity.

Some things never go out of style.

Why form NATO at all, if we don't have strategic interests in the area?

That begs the question.

Fifty years is a long time.

See I have my doubts that it can be considered to be only their interests at stake, here. Why form NATO at all, if we don't have strategic interests in the area?

"But what is really mind-boggling here is that McCain would have us double-down, and cheer-lead having NATO "revisit" the decision not to extend membership to Georgia! It is precisely this type of profoundly flawed thinking (think too the League of Democracies crapola bandied about from centrist advisors to Obama to the fanciful Kaganites around McCain who want to pick and choose who the supposed good and bad guys are meriting membership in the splendid "League") that has gotten Georgia into this bloody mess.

...

If we mean to help the Georgians escape an even worse fate, we must summon up the intelligence and humility to have a dialogue with Putin, Medvedev, Sergie Lavrov, Vitaly Churkin and the rest of them based on straight talk (not of the McCain variety, and if we can somehow find a messenger of the stature and talent to deliver the message in the right way, hard these days), to wit: we screwed up overly propping this guy up and he got too big for his britches, we understand, but for the sake of going forward strategic cooperation (and don't mention Iran here, at least not as the first example)--as well as stopping further civilian loss of life--agree to work with us in good faith towards a status quo ante as much as possible, don't enter Tbilisi, and throw show-boats Sarkozy/Kouchner a bone with some possible talk of a going forward EU peacekeeping role (if non-binding, for the time being). This is roughly what we should be saying/doing now, not having the President step up to the White House mike fresh back from the sand volleyball courts of Beijing to gravely declare Russia's actions are "unacceptable in the 21st century." Such talk will get us nowhere, instead, it might just fan the flames more (as will Cheney's threats of "serious consequences", apparently a favorite sound-bite of his, but this time mentioned only in the context of the U.S.-Russian relationship). Let us be clear: these men's credibility is a sad joke, and Putin knows it only too well. So let's get real. Before it's too late, and more facts are created on the ground, mostly on the backs of innocent civilians throughout Georgia's various regions."

This implies a level of planning I'm not convinced has occurred. True, (and in the words of Fred Thompson in "Red October"), the Russians don't take a dump without a plan, I really have to wonder if this was planned this way, or if there isn't some internal arguments going on.

Probably they were planning for actual western intervention. It seems like the planned to control Ossetia before western forces could arrive, so that they were negotiation from a position they were willing to give up, in exchange for other things they wanted. When it became clear that western forces would not be arriving any time soon, they decided to move on Abkhazia too. Like the Berlin wall, I think they expected more resistance than they got. Now they are going back to the original plan, negotiate away what they never planned on keeping, in order to get something else, probably some restrictions on Georgia in particular, and NATO expansion in general.

They may very well have figured on their vote on the security council would stymie any retaliation effort in the UN, but have they planned for being removed form the council?

I can see them being removed from the G8, but I don't foresee their SC veto power being taken away.

It was also a nice touch that it was Medvedev who made the anouncement. Remember that it was Vladimir Putin who said “war has started” last Friday. This good-cop-bad-cop approach to world affairs seems quite effective for the tandem.

This implies a level of planning I'm not convinced has occurred. True, (and in the words of Fred Thompson in "Red October"), the Russians don't take a dump without a plan, I really have to wonder if this was planned this way, or if there isn't some internal arguments going on. I mean, your description here seems to suggest the Russians are all of a mind about this. But what if they're not?

Certainly, for example, they didn't plan on how to handle the repercussions regionally, and in the UN. Example, it seems to me an open question if we'll now have the G7, instead of the G8. They may very well have figured on their vote on the security council would stymie any retaliation effort in the UN, but have they planned for being removed form the council? I doubt it, and I'd say that happening comes to about 50/50, just now. As I said at my own place, this morning, the Baltics are PISSED, and their anger may end up swaying enough in the UN to make it happen.

The question in my mind at least with Rumsfeld's remarks is not whether or not they were accurate, but whether by publicly stating them, using the language and tone that he did, he furthered our policy objectives, or hindered our policy objectives.

True. And it was a sneering dismissal of the objections of our traditional allies, which was unfortunate. The formulation otherwise was a useful one but not in that context.