http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=19574|

Ted Galen Carpenter is spot on. I wonder if the likes of kabud or La Russophobe will denounce him as a Kremlin stooge or “useful idiot” for working at the Cato Institute and advocating that America cut its foreign commitments in the interests not of leftist appeasement but of limited government and lower taxes at home? Carpenter is not Pat Buchanan, he is not singling out Israel for criticism or vitriol or rewriting the history of World War II. If the British Commander Jackson wasn’t willing to start WWIII over Pristina Airport (in spite of Gen. Wesley Clark’s stupid order) after NATO’s Kosovo war in 1999, why risk it for the Tblisi airport in 2008?

Thank God the Russians appear to have stopped short of Tblisi, going in there would trigger a bloodbath and clearly unacceptable to the U.S. But in a tiny country with Georgia, it’s hard to drive much beyond South Ossetia’s frontiers without ending up within artillery range of Tblisi. Think of all the Israeli-Syrian battles over the strategic Golan Heights from 48 until the Yom Kippur War in 73. South Ossetia is even smaller than the Golan. And the Syrians want the Golan back not so that they can resume shelling Israeli towns around Galilee, but so they can have the headwaters to the Jordan River. When I was in Israel in 2003 I quickly realized every ancient Tel-fort that commanded the Valley of Megiddo, dating back to King Solomon’s time and untold civilizations before that, had water cisterns.

I don’t if there are any natural resources in South Ossetia that make it worth the Georgians beating their head against the unmoving Bear. However, Abkhazia has some wonderful Black Sea beach front real estate that buyers in Moscow will probably start snatching up before the Olympics in neighboring Sochi. Both Stalin and Kruschev used to spend their winters there.

Perhaps that is the Russian endgame – without 24 hour UAV coverage paired with incredibly accurate artillery (something only the U.S., and Israel due to its small size and sophistication, are capable of), they cannot possibly kick every Georgian soldier out of cannon or rocket range of the rebel provinces in their own country. And the Russians have no desire to occupy the whole country with their still-hobbled military. But the Russians can occupy South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the commanding heights near the same, and basically return to the status quo, but with a much heavier footprint on the ground. Hopefully that is what Medvedev or others around him are telling Putin to do.

At the very least, any Americans left on the ground doing humanitarian work need to work as far away from the Russians and the loose cannon South Ossetian militias as possible. And what happens when Russian sailors board an American flag vessel to make sure all of the supplies on board are of a humanitarian nature? That could be tense, a sort of Cuban Missile Crisis situation in reverse. All the warmongers who want to send in the F-22s need to think for a second…August 1914…August 1914…China has restive provinces of its own. The precedents that were set in Kosovo when Clinton unleashed Albright to carry out her maxim of “what’s the point of having this great military if you never use it” are coming back to bite America in the butt. This is real blowback, not the “oh jee radical Muslims don’t like us” kind the leftists talk about, as if jihadists weren’t killing people all over the Muslim and non-Muslim world before Al-Qaeda came into existence.

I just hope the Russians pull back to South Ossetia and Abkhazia while all American forces are withdrawn from the country, except for the Embassy detail in Tblisi. The U.S. does not need this hassle right now. And in the long term, having made its point about former FSU countries provoking it by inviting in foreign troops and bases, neither does Russia. As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, the last thing Russia needs with its declining demographics and manpower pool for an army is a bunch of simmering wars or hostile powers on its enormous borders. And contrary to what the Kremlin may think now, there is only one nation in this world that has designs on Russian territory in the long term. And they are far more patient than the Americans, who merely want unfettered access to Central Asian natural resources and are exploiting Georgia and Ukraine as pawns for this purpose. Well, there are millions of people in eastern Ukraine who linguistically, ethnically, religiously, and culturally consider themselves to be Russian. What happens if Moscow starts issuing them passports before a razor-thin majority Orange Government can barely cobble together a coalition to get Ukraine into NATO? Am I an “appeaser” or leftist for asking such questions of the maximalist, triumphalist fools that are running the show in D.C.? I pray to God that Bush would call his father and the others around him who handled the breakup of the Soviet Union in a way that limited bloodshed from what was indeed, “a geopolitical catastrophe”. The collapse of the Soviet empire was no more bloodless or less catastrophic in terms of the millions it displaced than the end of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, or German empires. Putin had a point.

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=19574.

As Richard Fernandez has pointed out over at the Belmont Club website, every Russian soldier or border policeman in the Caucases is one less enforcing immigration laws on the wide-open Chinese border. Russia’s real internal problems won’t go away, and neither will the patient Chinese.

As for what the Russians have gained in the short run, this UK Times article fairly sums it up:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4525885.ece