Putin arrives at the Georgia war front

So, Vlad "the impaler" Putin has arrived at the conflict area to personally supervise the massacre. The Australian reports that prime minister Kevin Rudd witnessed a heated discussion between Bush and Putin, as athletes paraded before them in the Opening Ceremony on Friday night.

When Bush looked into Putin and was "able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country", I suppose Georgia did not show up anywhere. All we have been doing since then is irritating the cold, calculating, shrewd, and highly political Putin.

Anne Applebaum writes in Slate that the time to deal with this conflict was two years ago or four years ago. That there was a security vacuum in the Caucuses; that this vacuum was dangerous; that war was likely; that Georgia, an eager ally of the United States, would not come out of it well; that a successful invasion of Georgia, a country with U.S. troops on its soil, would reflect badly on the West—all of that has been obvious for a long time. Cowardice, weakness, lack of ideas, and above all the distraction of other events prevented any deeper engagement.

If you are like me, you probably are wondering how much President Bush's bizarre policies contributed to this. Well, here is Brendan O'Neill of Spiked: The bloodshed that occurred over the weekend, as Georgian forces bombed the breakaway territory of South Ossetia and Russia responded by attacking Georgia, can be seen as the destructive outcome of Washington’s increasingly hungry and erratic foreign policy. .... From the Ukraine to Uzbekistan to Georgia, Washington has backed a string of dodgy ruling parties and dictatorial leaders as they have upped the ante with their former rulers in the Kremlin. ....
Georgia, like many of the former Soviet republics, is a state with no real reason to exist. Lacking a unified national elite or identity, it is another of those Caucasian and Central Asian states that were born by default when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It is fragile, changeable, and has various ethnic or ‘national’ groups within its borders – not only in South Ossetia (which wants to join with North Ossetia) but also in Abkhazia, a Black Sea region that has largely run its own affairs since defeating Georgian forces in a war in 1992-1993.
Over the past decade, Washington’s foreign policy – increasingly patternless and self-defeating – has helped to make the unstable state of affairs in the former Soviet republics worse. America has sought to turn these republics into outposts in its ‘war on terror’.