This conflict has taken a decidedly surreal turn.
The well disciplined and flexible mobile tactics that the Russians used for the first five days seem to have been supplanted by traditional Russian slovenly slap dash.
Have the elite tank troops been replaced by ordinary motorized infantry? To what end? Or, is it that the world press have gotten the Russians into sharper focus and we are now seeing what always was there?
Now the narrative has shifted to cossack jihadis raping and pillaging the Georgian countryside. What can Putin possibly gain by unleashing these human wolves with the whole world watching?
Perhaps, this is part of the game. Bush sets the American trip wire and drunken Chechen *volunteers* engage in a fire fight with US troops at Tblisi airport. How can we retaliate against the benign Russian “peacekeepers?”
Some speak of a Georgian insurgency against a Russian occupation, but, the classic COIN strategy, that the US is too squemish to use, is to set insurgents against insurgents.
It was looking like the Russians had taken notes on the American invasion of Iraq, and, maybe they paid close attention to the opportunities presented by our mistakes and what we overlooked. Indeed, maybe it has been the Russian plan to avoid holding ground, deliberately leaving a vacuum for the Ossetians and their brothers to fill with looting.
It has morphed into a war of terror, not maneuver. Russia’s logistics train through the Roki tunnel is today carefully guarded. Putin would not risk clogging it with hundreds of carloads of undisciplined yahoos unless the *volunteers* and the havoc and terror they bring weren’t an essential part of his plan.
Volodya warned Bush in Beijing that he might not be able to restrain their enthusiasm.
We are watching an ancient horror unfold again in Georgia.