Foreign Secretary David Miliband spells out the UK position on Georgia:
The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others...
... Russian mind games on withdrawal do them no credit...
... International law must be obeyed. This goes to the heart of the question of how Russia comes to terms with its past, and how it sees its future; above all, whether it recognises that the old frontiers of the Soviet Union are now history, and whether Russia sees its future as part of a rules-based international system.
That sort of analysis rests on certain ... psychological assumptions.
One of them is that the reply will not be something like this:
The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.
Do we really look like a country with a plan? We don't have a plan.
The EU has plans, the World Bank has plans. You know what we are, West? We're a dog chasing cars. We wouldn't know what to do if we caught one.
We just do things. We're a wrench in the gears. We hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's.
Schemers trying to control their worlds. We are not a schemer. We show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.
So when I say that what happened to Georgia, your girlfriend, wasn't personal, you know I'm telling the truth.
You guys in the West were schemers. You had plans. Look where it got you.
I just did what I do best. I took your Kosovo plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this small country with a few tanks and a couple of bullets.
Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the Western media that tomorrow a gangbanger in Nagorno-Karabakh will get shot or a truckload of soldiers in Chechnya will get blown up, nobody panics.
But when I say one little country will get a small invasion, everyone loses their minds!
Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.
And you know the thing about chaos, West? It's fair.
Hmm. Doesn't this sound ... familiar?
