No More Mr. Nice Guy

Now that Russian troops are actually fighting in Georgia's breakaway province of South Ossetia they probably won't leave anytime soon. Not after NATO gave Russia a prime example of how this sort of operation works, in Kosovo. And, to be blunt, nothing brings greater joy to the collective heart of Washington's defense establishment than a new rationalization for more military spending. So don't believe what Condi says about peace: Washington has lots of ways to goose the Georgian government into further provocations of Moscow — one must read the reporting carefully to realize that it was a Georgian attempt to seize Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, that sparked the fighting — and even a lame duck Bush administration may well shuffle into a proxy mini-war in the Caucasus region.