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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Telegraph: The West must start to hit Russia where it hurts - in the roubles
2008-08-13
How fortunate, the armchair strategists say, that Georgia hadn't already joined Nato. For what would we have done then?

How would the mutual defence on which the pact is supposed to be based have come to the rescue of plucky little Georgia? Would stealth bombers have blackened the skies over Moscow? Would 2 Para be driving the Russian bear back into North Ossetia? Quite.

The events of the past four or five days in the Caucasus make one point very clearly, and we should all note it: it is of the uselessness of thumb-sucking international organisations in the face of a populous and heavily armed country that chooses to behave not in what President Bush has called a 21st-century fashion, but in an early 19th-century one.

If the threat of mutually assured destruction is removed from the equation - more of that later, I am afraid - then such organisations can only function given an element of scrupulousness in international affairs among the high and mighty. There is none.

You can talk about 1938; you can talk about 1914; you can even, if you want to show off, talk about 1811-12: what is in no doubt is that, several times in the modern era, the course of history has been changed by an escalation from the sort of opportunistic bullying we have seen in Georgia, and only a fool would say it would not be again.

Much more at link

Posted by:3dc

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