I spent much of the beach trip this week using a laptop to keep up with the Georgian situation, via the few new media reporters and many bloggers on or near the scene (most of their links available here at Black Five, scroll down), and came to a few unhappy conclusions. It seems obvious the Russians are there to stay. At the very least they will keep on burning, raping, killing and looting as it suits them and their mercenary pals. At the worst they may decide to used massed artillery/rockets to reduce Tbilisi to rubble.
Militarily, there is next to nothing we can do, unless we want to risk nuclear war. Bush’s and McCain’s continued demands for withdrawal only serve to make us look impotent. We really aren’t, not totally. But anything we do will be risky–including the dispatch of three U.S. Navy vessels with humanitarian aid, due to arrive next week. Signing up Poland for anti-missile interceptors (thankfully not to be installed for two more years, providing a breather there) seems to have gotten the Russians to consider arming Syria with more potent missiles against Israel, and may yet provoke them to openly aid Iran in its pursuit of nukes.
One good thing is that Russians really aren’t as powerful as they seem. Their arsenal is old, and poorly maintained, although they seem to have many more tactical nukes than we do, making conventional warfare with them even more risky. But theirs is no longer a command economy. It is a market one. If customers for the oil and gas on which their economy almost entirely depends, find new suppliers, they will be very weak, indeed. Yet, still, they will have those nukes.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 