Is it just me?

[tayefeth]

Or does the Bush administration's response to the whole Georgia/Russia conflict remind other people of the appeasement strategies before WWII? Has Medvedev/Putin published any eliminationist tracts we should know about

Comments

[solomita]

My instinct is that this (mostly) isn't an attempt by Russia to expand it's influence. It seems like we have peoples who have hated each other for a very long time, beyond an American scale of understanding, and have periodically done lots of violence to each other, playing out another round in the game. I can't exactly root for either side. Sticking to arbitrary tsarist and soviet provincial boundaries that put a minority under the control of a majority seems guaranteed to continue the problem.

Also, apparently there were Russian "peacekeepers" present in S.Ossetia who were killed when Georgia decided to take action, and Putin's Russia is not one to accept humiliation. We'll know Russia's true intent based upon whether they leave the current government in power and retreat to the "breakaway" provinces.

I wonder if Georgia grows peaches?

[tayefeth]

I haven't done a great deal of research on the topic, but I did hear an NPR piece on the situation almost a month before fighting broke out. It didn't sound as if the history in Georgia was anywhere near as violent as the Balkan ethnic conflicts, the Sunni/Shiite conflicts, or even the racial tensions in the American South