If these reports are accurate, General David Petraeus has recommended, and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates has adopted, a cautious approach toward troop draw-downs in Iraq. They apparently want to wait until early next year to cut the overall U.S. force from 15 brigades to 14, with one brigade initially scheduled for Iraq to be sent to Afghanistan instead. That they’re not calling for a more substantial reduction will disappoint opponents of the war effort and even some of its supporters but that strikes me as a prudent course to follow.

There is no disputing the remarkable gains of the past 18 months, with violence across Iraq down by some 80%. Just a few days ago, U.S. troops turned over Anbar Province to Iraqi control amid declarations by some stateside—but not by commanders on the ground—that “victory” has been achieved. There is no question that victory looks infinitely more achievable now than it did a couple of years ago, but we’re still not there yet. Lots of risks remain, with provincial elections probably coming at the end of the year and volatile situations such as the future of Kirkuk still unresolved.

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has vastly improved his own reputation by taking on Shiite militias in Basra and Sadr City but he now may be getting over-confident. There is a danger, as this Guardian article points out, that he may return to his sectarian roots. U.S. officials are especially worried, and rightly so, by indications that Maliki may be targeting the Sons of Iraq, the mostly Sunni force which has done so much to contribute to the growing sense of security. Meanwhile, the hard-line Shiite Special Groups have been put on the defensive but, as this report notes, they can stage a comeback with Iranian support.

Keeping a sizable U.S. force in Iraq for as long as American and Iraqi politics allows it is an essential hedge against a multitude of dangerous scenarios and the best way to preserve the hard-won gains of the surge.

American officials were enamored of Pervez Musharraf in the years after 9/11. He was said to be our “ally” in the war on terrorism. We poured in billions of dollars in support of his government and in return we got, to put it charitably, inconsistent results. Sometimes, yes, he would send the army after Islamic militants. But other times he would strike deals with them. Long before his recent downfall, the Taliban was strengthening their hold on the tribal areas in the west, which they have used to stage attacks into Afghanistan with the apparent complicity of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.

The Bush administration severely limited its response for fear of doing anything that would undermine Musharraf politically. Now that Musharraf is out, it appears that the self-imposed shackles are coming off. That, at any rate, is one way to interpret news that U.S. Joint Special Operations Command has sent its operators aboard helicopters to raid into Pakistan. The New York Times writes:

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had weighed plans to kill or capture top leaders of Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, but Mr. Rumsfeld, for all his public bravado, wanted to tread cautiously in Pakistan for fear of undermining Mr. Musharraf. With Mr. Musharraf’s resignation, that issue is no longer a concern.

U.S. forces still have to tread somewhat carefully. We do not have the desire or capabilities to get into a full-fledged land war in Pakistan, and Pakistan still has the capability to  retaliate effectively against us simply by closing the supply lines that run from the port of Karachi to NATO troops in Afghanistan. But if Musharraf’s departure frees us to inflict more damage on Taliban and Al Qaeda strongholds, that’s not such a bad thing.

This editorial in the Wall Street Journal Europe aptly characterizes the European Union’s ineffectual response to Russian aggression in Georgia as “Stop! Or We’ll Say Stop Again!” It is indeed pathetic–but hardly surprising–to see how ineffectual the institutions of post-modern Europe are in dealing with a throwback aggressor seemingly straight out of the early 20th century.

Still, while other nations aren’t doing much to punish Russia or to make it evacuate all of its troops from Georgian soil, it is at least comforting to see that other states aren’t rushing to support the aggressors either. Last week the Russians tried and failed to get backing from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization made up, in addition to Russia, of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. All are illiberal states that Putin hopes to organize into an anti-Western bloc. But while these countries are hardly friends of America, they are not rushing to fall in behind Russian
imperialism. The Central Asian states, in particular, have good cause to fear that if Russia succeeds in Georgia, they could be next in the Kremlin’s sights, while China has its own reasons to be suspicious of Russia, especially given the competition between the two in the Far East.

The media spoke of American diplomatic “isolation” at the time of the Iraq War. It is instructive, now, to see what true isolation looks like. The problem is that the U.S. as a liberal democratic state is far more sensitive to the pressures of world opinion than an autocracy of the sort Russia has become. Expressions of foreign disapproval will count for little in the calculations of the hard cases who now run the Kremlin. Sterner steps are called for. But so far–aside from a U.S. naval visit to Georgia and the conclusion of a missile defense pact between the U.S. and Poland–have yet to materialize.

It seems fitting that, on the same day that newspapers are full of stories over how the U.S. has turned Anbar Province over to Iraqi control, there is a report on the Christian Science Monitor’s website about tribal forces mobilizing against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s frontier regions.

The Monitor quotes Pakistani news reports about the formation of an anti-Taliban militia in the Bajaur Agency which has torched the houses of some Taliban leaders. Other tribal groupings are in revolt against the Taliban in parts of the Northwest Frontier Province.

This is a reminder of how unpopular fundamentalist groups like the Taliban, or Al Qaeda in Iraq, are with ordinary Muslims once they are exposed to their harsh rule, and it at least raises the prospect that perhaps eventually a revolt along the lines of the Anbar Awakening will occur in Pakistan. Of course, the reason the Awakening finally succeeded in 2008 was that it had strong support from U.S. forces. The U.S. government is trying to provide some backing to the tribes in Pakistan. But it is hard to do without a lot of U.S. troops on the ground and without more cooperation from the Pakistani government, which is presently preoccupied with its own political difficulties. Still, this nascent “awakening” offers the only glimmer of hope I can see in Pakistan’s bleak situation.

Herewith some thoughts (from someone who is admittedly a foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign) on the foreign policy portion of Obama’s acceptance speech. . . .

John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell - but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.

I’ve been puzzling over what this means ever since I heard it last night. I still can’t figure it out. Is Obama accusing John McCain of a lack of personal courage and promising that he, Barack Obama, who was a “community organizer” in Chicago during the same stretch of his life when McCain was an inmate of the Hanoi Hilton, that he will personally hunt down the arch-terrorist while McCain won’t? Or is it merely an allusion to his old promise to bomb Pakistan? McCain has criticized Obama for needlessly complicating relations with Pakistan by threatening to attack its territory without its government’s permission, but does anyone doubt that President McCain would order a bombing strike if he had good information about where bin Laden was hiding?

And today, as my call for a time frame to remove our troops from Iraq has been echoed by the Iraqi government and even the Bush Administration, even after we learned that Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we’re wallowing in deficits, John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war.

John McCain has said he would bring most troops home from Iraq by 2012, the end of his first term in office-or sooner if they can be pulled out without endangering their hard-won gains. That is not a “stubborn refusal to end a misguided war”; it is a stubborn refusal to accept defeat as the price of ending the war-which Obama clearly has no problem doing.

I was thrown for a loop by the inclusion of the “$79 billion surplus” in this sentence. What point is he trying to make? That we should not spend any of our resources to fight in Iraq because its government has an estimated $79 billion in oil revenue it hasn’t spent yet? The government of Kuwait had a lot of oil riches too but that didn’t stop us from fighting to liberate it in 1991–a war that few would now criticize, even those (like Joe Biden) who voted against it at the time. The mention of Iraq’s oil riches would be relevant if the argument were about whether we should extend economic aid to Iraq. But no one is arguing for that. The fact that Iraq has a lot of oil money does not mean that it can defend itself against Iran, Al Qaeda, and other aggressors.

We need a President who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.

A vacuous phrase designed, as far as I can tell, to attack McCain for being old without coming out and saying so. What “threats of the future” does Obama recognize that McCain doesn’t? Usually when Democrats talk like this, they are accusing Republicans of “not getting it” on AIDS, global warming, and other “soft power” issues. But that’s a ludicrous charge to make against McCain, who has broken with Republican orthodoxy on global warming. And what “ideas of the past” is McCain grasping at that Obama rejects? The idea that you should win wars, rather than simply give up the fight? The idea that you should confront aggressors from a position of strength rather than try to appease them from a position of weakness?

You don’t defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq.

There is considerable evidence that the shellacking that Al Qaeda has taken in Iraq is affecting its global standing. Muslims are not rushing to join its cause the way they once were because Al Qaeda has been revealed to be particularly cruel (targeting mostly fellow Muslims) and, just as important, ineffectual–it has been defeated by the Great Satan. That won’t spell an end to Al Qaeda everywhere, but it’s far better than the alternative–a defeat in Iraq, of the kind Obama tried to legislate when he called for all U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn by early 2008, would have emboldened Al Qaeda as much as their perceived defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan did.

You don’t protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington.

True, but you also don’t deter Iran by talking weak in Washington, as Obama has done.

You can’t truly stand up for Georgia when you’ve strained our oldest alliances.

Another puzzling statement. Is he accusing John McCain of straining “our oldest alliances”? Arguably that was a fair charge to make against George W. Bush during his first term, but his secretary of state wasn’t John McCain. Moreover, Obama seems not to have noticed that we actually have much better relations with old allies such as Italy, France, and Germany today because all of them have fairly pro-American leaders. That hasn’t made it any easier to “stand up for Georgia,” of course, because those states are still unwilling to confront Russia as forthrightly as McCain advocates. It remains a mystery how Obama will “stand up for Georgia” when his initial reaction to the Russian invasion was to call for “restraint” on both sides-akin, as many have pointed out, to suggesting that both the Czechs and the Nazis needed to show restraint when Hitler’s armies rolled into Czechoslovakia.

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.

As Matthew Continetti points out at weeklystandard.com, “It’s been more than 40 years since John F. Kennedy was president. Since then, three other Democrats have held the office: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Why didn’t Obama mention them? Is this a tacit acknowledgment that the foreign policies of those presidents were, to put it charitably, a mixed bag?”

It is a particularly odd refrain to hear coming from Obama whose foreign policy has much more in common with George McGovern’s “come home, America” than it does with John F. Kennedy and his pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Nowadays that kind of talk would be denounced by Democrats as “neocon warmongering.”

I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Once again, Obama continues his refusal to acclaim “victory” as the goal in our current wars. Will Americans really be satisfied with “ending” or “finishing” a war (or, more accurately, ending our involvement in the war, which might actually lead to a wider conflict) if the cost of doing so is a terrible defeat?

I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression.

Talk about unwarranted “tough talk” of the kind Obama has just denounced. How exactly will his promise of unconditional talks with dictators “prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression”?

But other than that, of course, it was a great speech.

Burma (or, if you prefer, Myanmar) has fallen out of the news since Cyclone Nargis ravaged that country, killing at least 80,000 people in May. But the horrors of the Burmese police state remain unchanged. Two new articles, in The Atlantic and the New Yorker, provide a helpful primer on what’s going on, why it matters, and what we should do about it.

In the New Yorker, George Packer reports on a recent visit to Rangoon, where he finds a climate of fear challenged only by a few brave dissidents. Many opponents of the military regime, ranging from students to Buddhist monks, are impatient with protests that are easily quashed by force. They hope for a deus ex machina in the form of American military intervention:

“One night in Rangoon, I had beers with a famous artist whose work is banned by the regime. He told the story of a friend in Mandalay who became pregnant and developed a serious case of swollen feet. She was taken to the hospital, where a doctor kept bringing in medical students to examine her, without ever telling her what could be done. “When the U.N. comes here, someone always wants to see me,” the artist said. “They tell me they’re sorry about the situation, to be patient.” These visits, he said, had begun to feel like the examination of his pregnant friend. He suddenly declared, “The only solution is for the U.S. to drop a bomb on Naypyidaw [Burma’s new capital]. That’s the only way! Ninety per cent of Burmese would tell you the same thing. The world is very angry at America because of Iraq. If you use one per cent of the money and one per cent of the bombs here, the world will see you in a better way.” It’s a commonly expressed wish in Rangoon: I met a man who had hand-delivered a letter to the American Embassy, where the U.S. keeps a low-level diplomatic presence, petitioning President George W. Bush to “bombard Burma.” No one at the Embassy would accept the letter, and when I advised the man not to expect an American invasion, he looked crushed. “Why?” he pleaded.”

It’s nice to see, contrary to Democratic Party dogma, that American military intervention has not been entirely discredited, but there is scant chance of the Marines showing up in Rangoon to topple this abhorrent regime. Yet the policy we have actually been pursuing, of trying to isolate the military junta through sanctions, has plainly failed. Packer quotes a “Western diplomat in Rangoon” saying, “Sanctions are a joke—they’re just a pressure release. The generals don’t care what the rest of the world thinks about them, because they don’t think about the rest of the world. What they care about is their financial and physical security.”

The generals’ security is guaranteed as long as major regional players such as China and India are willing to do business with them, and at the moment, thanks to Burma’s wealth of natural resources and strategic position on the Indian Ocean, business is good. Packer doesn’t hold out much hope for the “alternative policy—economic engagement.” That has been tried by Burma’s neighbors and the result has been that “the junta grows stronger while the country sinks deeper into poverty.”

He leaves readers of the New Yorker with scant hope of positive change: “The hope—and it isn’t much more than that—of critics of American policy is that a new generation of military officers will come to power with the understanding that government by plunder has hit diminishing returns.” That may happen, but given that the military has ruled since 1962 there is no reason to think that the up and coming officers will be any more liberal than their predecessors, especially when they are the biggest beneficiaries of the existing system.

In the Atlantic, Robert Kaplan, one of our most thoughtful foreign correspondents, examines more hard-headed strategies for bringing down the military junta. His article is presented in the form of conversations with four Americans, mostly Special Forces veterans, who are deeply knowledgeable about the country and involved in humanitarian relief efforts. They suggest providing covert support to ethnic insurgents—Karens, Shans, Kachins, and others–who in some cases have been fighting the Burmese government since the 1940’s. Kaplan quotes one anonymous experts, the offspring of American missionaries who came to Burma in the 19th century:

“To topple the regime in Burma,” he says, “the ethnics need a full-time advisory capability, not in-and-out soldiers of fortune. This would include a coordination center inside Thailand. There needs to be a platform for all the disaffected officers in the Burmese military to defect to.”

Kaplan quotes another expert, retired Army Colonel Timothy Heinemann:

“Burma’s got a 400,000-man army [the active-duty U.S. Army is 500,000] that’s prone to mutiny,” Heine¬mann went on. “Only the men at the very top are loyal. You could spread rumors, conduct information warfare. It might not take much to unravel it.”

Of course, even if the Burmese regime could be unraveled, the consequences would have to be carefully managed, or else we could risk another fiasco, a la Iraq. It would be important to balance ethnic constituencies in a future Burmese democracy. But that’s getting ahead of the story. There is no guarantee, to put it mildly, that the strategy Kaplan advocates—of backing existing rebellions against the generals—would work. But we know that every other policy has even less chance of success. He suggests that, with a modest application of resources, we have little to lose and much to gain—not only ending a humanitarian disaster but also checking the influence of China which has been in bed with the Burmese junta because it “needs a cooperative, if not supine, Burma for the construction of deepwater ports, highways, and energy pipelines that can open China’s landlocked south and west to the sea.”

Everywhere, even from those who are otherwise not sympathetic to Russia, you hear that Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili “started” the war which resulted in the Russian invasion of his country. The best summary of what actually happened can be found in the report by the invaluable Michael Totten that Abe cited earlier. Totten shows clearly, based on on-the-ground reporting, that it was the Russians and their Ossetian puppets who were the aggressors. Perhaps Saakashvili still would have been well-advised to ignore the shelling of Georgian villages from South Ossetia, Russian violations of Georgian air space, and other provocations. But if he had done so the result would have been the slow-motion loss of Georgian sovereignty. Clearly Saakashvili did not handle the current conflict as well as he should have, but it would be nice if supposedly enlightened voices in the West stopped blaming the victim on the grounds that he “had it coming.”

In a neat juxtaposition, the front page of the New York Times today carries an article outlining a draft agreement on the removal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq in 2011 right below another article which shows why it’s dangerous to rush for the
exits. This story focuses on tensions between the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq and the largely Sunni members of the Awakening, many of them former insurgents who have allied with U.S. and Iraqi forces. The Iraqi government, it seems, is targeting some Awakening members for arrest while dragging its feet on hiring others into the Iraqi Security Forces (as Peter has noted).

The merits of the individual cases are hard to sort out, and in any case don’t matter that much. The broader point is to highlight how fragile recent gains have been and how easily they could evaporate if U.S. forces leave too soon. (A point that General David Petraeus, now departing Iraq after the most successful turnaround by any American general since Matthew Ridgeway in Korea, makes in this interview.) At the moment there is still great distrust between different ethno-sectarian groups in Iraq, and, aside from the role they still play in patrolling the streets, U.S. troops perform another invaluable function: Much as in Bosnia and Kosovo, they serve as an impartial peacekeeping force that can be trusted by all sides even when they don’t trust one another.

The accord on pulling out U.S. forces, if implemented along the lines described by the New York Times, would probably not jeopardize the progress that has been made. If the reports in the Times and other MSM outlets are accurate, the U.S. and Iraq have agreed that U.S. combat forces would pull out of Iraq’s urban areas by next summer and out of Iraq altogether by the end of 2011—but only if the current rate of progress continues. That’s a notable difference from Barack Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan which would pull all U.S. combat forces out by mid-2010 regardless of conditions on the ground. Of course both the draft U.S.-Iraq document and the Obama plan leave a big loophole: they only apply to combat forces, allowing the possibility that U.S. advisory and support forces in substantial numbers could remain in Iraq for many years to come. (The line between combat and support forces isn’t hard and fast; it might be possible to stay within the letter of an accord by changing the name of a brigade from Brigade Combat Team to Brigade Training Team.)

I hope it will be politically possible, both in the U.S. and Iraq, to keep a substantial force in Iraq beyond 2011—not, I hope, to engage in combat operations, and certainly not to suffer casualties, but simply to provide reassurance of American commitment to Iraqi democracy and to prevent any ethno-sectarian group from oppressing the others. Or even to guard against a military coup. In a country as embattled as Iraq, any number of things can go wrong. Only an American commitment can safeguard this fragile democracy and thereby safeguard our own interests in the region.

In this front-page New York Times “news analysis,” correspondent Peter Baker suggests that the U.S. needs Russia a lot more than Russia needs us. As one of his sources puts it, “Russia has all the leverage.” The implicit message: There isn’t much we can or should do to Russia in retaliation for its invasion of Georgia.

In point of fact, the story, if read carefully, offers plenty of evidence for the opposite conclusion: that we don’t have much to lose by getting tough with Russia because it’s already obstructing our goals at every turn.

Here is how Baker lays out the potential options for Russia to hurt us:

In addition to escalated arms sales to other anti-American states like Iran and Venezuela, policy makers and specialists in Washington envision a freeze on counterterrorism and nuclear nonproliferation cooperation, manipulation of oil and natural gas supplies, pressure against United States military bases in Central Asia and the collapse of efforts to extend cold war-era arms control treaties.

Actually Russia has already done all of that and more, as Baker admits later on in the article:

Israeli and Western governments have already been alarmed about reports that the first elements of the Russian-built S-300 antiaircraft missile system are now being delivered to Iran, which could use them to shoot down any American or Israeli planes that seek to bomb nuclear facilities should that ever be attempted….The two sides (Russia and the U.S.) have already effectively suspended any military cooperation programs….. Just last month, Russia vetoed sanctions against Zimbabwe’s government, a move seen as a slap at Washington…It already has suspended the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty to protest American missile defense plans and threatened to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty.

Of course Russia can ratchet up the pressure even more—for instance by selling Syria, which already receives Russian arms, even more sophisticated missile systems, as Baker notes. But we are not without leverage as well, notably in frustrating the desire of the Putin gang to be given legitimacy on the international stage and the chance to stash their loot in Western bank accounts. More importantly, we can frustrate Russia’s imperial designs by helping to arm its fretful neighbors.

We should not refrain from such steps because we fear Russian retaliation. It seems a given that the current rulers in the Kremlin will do whatever they can to annoy and frustrate us. If we let them get away without paying any penalty for their aggression in Georgia, as we are now doing, they will only be emboldened toward greater aggression in the future.

The Washington Post has a poignant editorial today protesting the unjust sentence handed down by an Egyptian court against well-known dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim:

This month, Mr. Ibrahim was convicted of seditious libel or “tarnishing” the image of Egypt. For this transgression, the ailing, 69-year-old scholar was sentenced to two years in jail, with hard labor, and ordered to pay a fine equivalent to about $1,500. The prime piece of evidence against Mr. Ibrahim: The opinions he expressed in this newspaper.

This is of a piece with Hosni Mubarak’s crackdown against all conceivable liberal challengers. Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to run against Mubarak in the last presidential election in 2005, remains in prison on trumped up charges of fabricating signatures for his qualification petitions. (Luckily for Ibrahim, he is living outside Egypt these days so he won’t be in an adjoining cell—as long as he doesn’t return to his homeland.) And, for all of President Bush’s championing of dissidents such as these, the Mubarak regime still continues to get approximately $2 billion a year in U.S. aid, no strings attached. As the Post notes:

There was a time, only a few years ago, when [Bush] withheld millions of dollars in aid to Egypt until the country released Mr. Ibrahim from an unjust incarceration. Now, the administration can only muster an official, feeble “expression of disappointment” through an organ of the State Department as it continues to funnel billions to Egypt, enabling Mr. Mubarak to run an increasingly repressive police state.

Sooner or later Bush will have to address the obvious question: Was he wrong in his first term to make support for democrats and dissidents a central focus of his presidency? Or is he wrong today to quietly walk away from his earlier advocacy? Or, perhaps more accurately, to let his underlings quietly walk away from his earlier advocacy?

In his heart of hearts, I suspect that Bush feels as passionately as ever about “the freedom agenda,” which makes it all the more puzzling that he has allowed his secretary of state and others to shrink it to the vanishing point. Bush can still point to a few statements of support for dissidents. But his actions haven’t matched his rhetoric, leaving those who stuck out their necks—brave men like Ibrahim and Nour—to pay the price.

Bob Herbert, “A World of Difference,” New York Times, August 19:

So it might come as a surprise to some that Senator McCain’s macho hero [Teddy Roosevelt] happened to have been among the first naturalists at Harvard, an inveterate bird-watcher, and a prolific and sensitive writer.

David D. Kirkpatrick, “After 2000 Run, McCain Learned to Work Levers of Power,” New York Times, July 21:

Entertaining guests at his property in Sedona, Ariz., he [John McCain] invariably drags them for long walks to indulge his passion for bird watching. “If you took all the people at Gitmo, put them in the cabin for a weekend and made them listen to John talk about the birds, they would all spill their guts,” Mr. [Lindsay] Graham said.

Say this for the Russian regime. It may be composed of thugs, crooks, and liars, but its supporters and officials sure do have a way with words. My op-ed in the Los Angeles Times yesterday (entitled “Stand Up to Russia”) has brought this witty response from Pravda. The whole thing is worth reading for a laugh. But as a public service I hereby excerpt some of the best bits:

[T]his two-page schmuckfest of unadulterated bilge . . . could almost have been printed by the British Bullshit Corporation or written by that other insolent female who got a Pulitzer. . . . Paragraph after paragraph of lies, fabrications and insults more befitting of a latrine wall, written by some demented retard with his own excrement, than in the pages of what I thought (until last night) was a reputable publication. I mean, what an eye opener. . . . Max Boot calls Russia’s crossing into Georgia a violation of international law. So what does he have to say about the USA’s act of criminal agression [sic] and mass murder in Iraq? What does he have to say about the deployment of WMD in civilian areas? What does he have to say about the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians? What does he have to say about the concentration camp at Guantanamo, which brings back flashes of Belsen, Treblinka and Dachau, or the innumerous concentration and extermination camps in the Baltic States?

Ironically, the author of this love note complains that “vapid claptrap” like my article is an indication that “it is virtually impossible for any US citizen to have a balanced idea of world events. The citizens of the USA are being misinformed, lied to and made clowns of by their own media.” Actually, it’s Russians who are being snowed under by their government-controlled media (of which Pravda is one organ among many others). Voice of America reports:

William Dunbar is a British citizen who worked as Tbilisi correspondent for Russia Today, Moscow’s international English-language television service. Dunbar resigned his position Saturday when the broadcaster refused to air his reports after he informed viewers on live TV that Russian warplanes had bombed the central Georgian city of Gori.

“I felt that I could no longer work for them because there was no real way hat I could be able to report the facts, and they did not really want to now what was really going on in Georgia if it did not sort of fit with the agenda that they were trying to put out,” Dunbar said.

The line the Kremlin is feeding its people can be glimpsed in this op-ed in today’s Financial Times by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He claims “there is . . . clear evidence” that Georgia has committed”atrocities” that are “so serious and systematic that they constitute acts of genocide.” Who knew that Georgia had committed genocide? But if the Baltic states can be guilty of running “concentration and extermination camps,” there’s no reason why Georgia cannot be guilty of even more heinous offenses–at least in the vivid Russian imagination.

“There can be little surprise, therefore, that Russia responded to this unprovoked assault on its citizens by launching a military incursion into South Ossetia,” Lavrov continues, as if Russian troops and its Ossetian puppets have not been goading Georgia for years by incursions into its territory (which, by the way, still includes Abkhazia and South Ossetia, not recognized as independent states by any other country). The notion that Russia cares about the fate of ethnic minorities in the Caucasus is particularly rich, given the way Russian troops razed Grozny and killed tens of thousands of people in their vicious campaign to retain control of Chechnya.

Lavrov goes on: “Despite Georgia’s assertion that it had imposed a unilateral ceasefire, Russian peacekeepers and supporting troops remained under continued attack–a fact confirmed by observers and journalists in the region.” Of course, what the bulk of “observers and journalists” say is precisely the opposite–that the Georgians tried to stop fighting but the Russians wouldn’t stop their attacks. Even now that Russia has announced a ceasefire, reports from Georgia indicate that its troops continue attacking.

It should be no surprise that Russian spokesmen are masters of the Big Lie–their Soviet predecessors practically invented the technique. What continues to depress and annoy me is how many well-intentioned Westerners are falling for the Russian line that it was really the Georgians who were the aggressors here.

I am relieved to hear the Russia has called off its invasion of Georgia, although whether actions on the ground will match the words emanating from Moscow remains to be seen. But I am very, very depressed at the pusillanimous reaction to Russian aggression in what used to be called the Free World. Far too many are rushing to blame the victims. A perfect example of this mindset is this column by Newsweek’s Michael Hirsch. He begins, “There is no excusing Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion of Georgia,” but then he proceeds to offer one excuse after another. “Since the cold war ended,” he writes, “the United States has been pushing the buttons of Russian frustration and paranoia by moving ever further into Moscow’s former sphere of influence. And we have rarely stopped to consider whether we were overreaching, even as evidence mounted that the patience of a wealthier and more assertive Russia was wearing very thin.”

Andrew Sullivan (as Peter has noted) expresses more fear of supposed neocon warmongering than of actual Russian war-waging. He writes:

My only fear at this point is that . . . we may goad the Bushies and neocons into finding some kind of military escalation that would bring in the US. The US has no rational basis to be as committed to Georgia as Russia is; and has very little moral standing to protest an invasion of a sovereign country.

This is very much the prevailing sentiment in Western Europe, where the elites think the current fighting was the fault of the Georgian government for daring to challenge the Russian bear. This Wall Street Journal article offers telling examples:

“In the minds of the Western European countries, Georgia has been rash “in trying to take control of South Ossetia through military force, said Sergio Romano, a former Italian ambassador to NATO and Moscow. “This will harden attitudes” in France, Germany and Italy.

Georgia’s military move last week was “not terribly wise,” said one U.K. official, who declined to be named.

There is no doubt that Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has made miscalculations. Certainly he did not intend for Russian troops to overrun a good chunk of his country. Perhaps he shouldn’t have responded to Russian provocations at all, but at some point Russian incursions would have become intolerable, with Georgian sovereignty lost bit by bit. The Kremlin clearly was spoiling for war, and it got what it wanted. Blaming the Georgians for not doing a better job of appeasing Moscow is akin to blaming the Czechs for not doing a better job of appeasing Berlin over the Sudeten Germans. Everyone understands the dangers of appeasement–but only in retrospect. In the present day it’s alive and well.

The reaction of certain left-wing pundits to Russia’s invasion of Georgia would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. Instead of exercising their rhetorical skills to denounce this flagrant violation of international law—haven’t they noticed that Russia made no attempt to win UN authorization for its actions?—they are instead fulminating that some might dare to compare Russian aggression to the past aggression of Germany or the Soviet Union.

Thus our old friend Joe Klein—last seen denouncing “Jewish neoconservatives” who were supposedly putting Israel’s interests first—now apparently thinks that these same neocons are selling out our interests to Georgia, of all countries. (Perhaps Bob Kagan’s name was originally Kaganili?) Sayeth Klein: “it is important, yet again, to call out the endless neoconservative search for new enemies, mini-Hitlers.” And he links approvingly to a post by Matt Yglesias who “picks up on the same neoconservative Naziphilia at his new blog site.”

It turns out that the ranks of the neocons are broader than even Klein and his ilk have suspected. There is, in fact, a new convert. This foreign policy analyst says:

Unfortunately, Putin is putting Russia on a course that is ominously similar to Stalin’s and Hitler’s in the late 1930s. Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has correctly drawn an analogy between Putin’s “justification” for dismembering Georgia — because of the Russians in South Ossetia — to Hitler’s tactics vis a vis Czechoslovakia to “free” the Sudeten Deutsch.

The name of this “neocon”? None other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, who usually denounces “neocon” influence in terms vitriolic enough to satisfy even Joe Klein.

One of the world’s most powerful nations has invaded a small, democratic neighbor. The war is widening by the day. Some commentators are already suggesting that “[h]istorians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.”

So what was on the cable news when I tuned in this morning at the gym? The two biggest subjects seemed to be the Olympics and the John Edwards scandal. Talk about misplaced priorities. It’s time to give the conflict in Georgia the kind of nonstop coverage it deserves-the kind that the MSM seem to give only to sex scandals, crimes involving attractive women, and wars involving American troops. This isn’t a war in which we are directly involved but indirectly it is of enormous consequence to the future of the United States and our allies. It should be put in the MSM spotlight and kept there.