Normal bombing operations resumed in the Middle East

“WE APOLOGISE for the unplanned hiatus in bombing of the Middle East. Normal service has now been resumed.”

That is what Obama ought to have said, right, to go along with his global apology tours? 

Oh well, it will be damn funny but for the reality that we have opened up yet another front for military operations.  Anyway,. that quote is how the Economist's Lexington's comments begin.  But, it does seem like at the end of it all, Lexington prefers this than otherwise.  In fact, the more I think about this Lexington column, the more it seems like there is nothing new or profound or analytical.  It is just blah, like a Bob Herbet NY Times column; BTW, I am glad Herbert is departing.

Robert Kaplan says that Libya is like Kosovo, and not Iraq.  He writes:

Even if Libya's new leaders carried copies of Thomas Paine in their rucksacks, they would find themselves reigning over a wasteland, and not just physically—a country bereft of democratic traditions, institutions, or the slenderest levers of a civil society. Someone's going to have to step in and spend tens of billions of dollars and devote years or decades of hard effort, to helping the Libyan people develop such things—and to do so with the backing of a large police or military force to provide security in the meantime—or face the prospect that a nastier group of people, from within or outside, will take over and impose a different sort of social order, a new, perhaps more threatening, dictatorship.
The biggest flaw in U.S. strategy for the Iraq war was the failure to do any planning for postwar stabilization. This failure unleashed all the nightmares that followed. Libya is not Iraq. Obama's motives for intervening in Libya were much different from George W. Bush's motives for invading Iraq, and the level of this intervention is explicitly much lower—more, at least avowedly, in support of the European and Arab leaders who took the initiative and have more vital stakes in the outcome. But there are still lessons to be gleaned from Iraq's postwar power vacuum and the chaos that ensued as a result.
Obama took such pains to make clear that the United States was playing a mere supporting role in the Libyan war—and even went ahead with a scheduled trip to South America to demonstrate that this war is not a major, all-consuming thing—in part to make clear that we wouldn't be playing more than a supporting role after the war is over.
But who will? Who can? And shouldn't someone have thought this through before the bombs started falling?

Yeah, shouldn't someone have thought this through?

Georgia understimated Russia. Russia "over-retaliated"

Gary Brecher at Exiled Online sums it up well:
The fretting and fussing and sky-is-falling crap about this war is going to die down fast, and the bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

But, before concluding thus, Brecher writes:
Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn’t react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock’n’awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then…uh, they’d be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did.