Richard Beeston and Edward Lucas both know what they're talking about on Georgia.
Both wonder if Georgian impulsiveness is not going to backfire. Lucas:
It seems Russia is ready to hit back hard, in the hope of squashing the West's pestilential protégé. In short, it looks more and more as though Georgia has fallen in to its enemies' trap. The script went like this: first mount unbearable provocations, then wait for a response, and finally reply with overwhelming military force and diplomatic humiliation.
What do the Russians want? Free Thinker drills down into the comment section of a Russian website to try to find out:
It's strange: this discussion thread is in some ways a model of democratic debate, with a wide range of views expressed. There's a right-left spectrum of sorts, only its center of gravity of the discussion is in a disturbing place.
Mind you, look at the Comments on my own Indy Open House piece about the rules on memoirs for former diplomats if you want to see some 'disturbing' thoughts:
When is Britain going to cast-off the cord to Washington, and tell the yankee-doodles to go to hell? Sucking-up to tyranical despots because they're Uncle Sam's buddies is not in Britain's interests, and is a gut-wrenching travesty of what British diplomacy is supposed to achieve.
Sigh.
The one thing the disparate CIS frozen conflicts have in common is this. Russia could have worked with its European partners to use its weight and ingenuity to solve these problems on modern creative democratic terms. Instead it has done little other than create morbid little pockets of corruption and instability, essentially for psychological reasons: to show the world and itself than it can not be 'pushed around in its own backyard'.
Hence another failure of 'European diplomacy' in wanting to look away from the hard choice here which Poland and some other former Communist countries correctly insisted was the only real one. Either these European countries are given a fair chance to be free to join the Western democratic mainstream, or they stay in a new sort of virtual Soviet empire.
Except that once the Russian tanks start moving in, it is not that virtual.
Edward Lucas again:
The fighting should be a deafening wake-up call to the West. Our fatal mistake was made at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April, when Georgia's attempt to get a clear path to membership of the alliance was rebuffed. Mr Saakashvili warned us then that Russia would take advantage of any display of Western weakness or indecision. And it has.
