Ben Smith: 'Invasion of Georgia' a '3 A.M. Moment'. The reference is back to Clinton's anti-Obama ad, but the guy with the itchy trigger finger is John McCain.

While Obama offered a response largely in line with statements issued by democratically elected world leaders, including President Bush, first calling on both sides to negotiate, John McCain took a remarkably -- and uniquely -- more aggressive stance, siding clearly with Georgia's pro-Western leaders and placing the blame for the conflict entirely on Russia.

McCain's ready to take the call because this is one world conflict he's really boned up on, putting him more out on a limb than 99.999% of the American people. His secret: top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann is (or at least was, until very recently) a paid agent of the Georgia government. There are a lot of dangerous aspects to McCain's foreign policy posture, but the most recklessly insane is his eagerness to regenerate the "cold war" he built his career and identity in by pushing Russia into a defensive corner: by expanding NATO, by ringing Russia with antimissile systems, by kicking Russia out of the UN in favor of a "league of democratic states"; but in a world where little things count, the easiest way to provoke Russia into doing something stupid is through Georgia. Of course, this is not really McCain's doing: he's just chief cheerleader, as usual. The groundwork has been laid by Bush: in pushing military aid under the "war on terrorism" brand; in fomenting the "Rose Revolution" which brought "pro-American" nationalist Mikhail Saakashvili to power; and in backing Saakashvili's own initial invasion of South Ossetia.

Of course, the real thing to do when this sort of thing happens at 3 AM is to do what most people would do: roll over, go back to sleep, face the problem fresh in the morning, get the facts, and give it some careful thought.

Eric Kleefeld: McCain Camp: Obama "Bizarrely in Sync with Moscow". This is McCain trying to make hay with the crisis, using his typical your-either-with-us-or-with-the-enemy logic. What's merely presumed here is even more chilling than the bizarre rhetoric: that Russia is our sworn enemy, and that therefore Georgia, because they've appealed to us for support in a conflict that matters not a whit to anyone in America, is therefore our vital ally.

Tony Karon: Has Georgia Overreached in Ossetia?. Probably the best single piece to read on the conflict. The key things to understand are that South Ossetia has effectively been independent of Georgia since breaking away in the early 1990s; that the conflict was initiated by Georgia attempting to seize back territory that was part of the pre-independence Georgian SSR; and that Georgia has been fervently lobbying the US and NATO for support, or in some cases vice versa. Also that when push comes to shove, Russia will very probably prevail, no matter how bad they look in doing so. What he doesn't point out is that for Cold War revivalists like McCain, the most valuable thing to come out of this is that Russia and Putin look bad; martyring the Georgians and/or the Ossetians is just collateral damage.

James Traub: Taunting the Bear. If you want to read more (a lot more), including much on the similar conflict with Abkhazia -- like South Ossetia, Abkhazia is another non-Georgian part of the former Georgian SSR that broke off in the early 1990s, achieving autonomy, which it has maintained with Russian support. (Presumably, if Georgia regains South Ossetia, they will move into Abkhazia next -- another offense against Russia.) While the history helps (but could be better), the most interesting bits in the article are the reactions:

In a recent essay, the archrealist Henry Kissinger argued that Putin-era policy had been driven not by dreams of restored glory, but by "a quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice." Some Russia experts on the left, like Stephen Cohen of Princeton, have taken a similar view. But Russia's bellicose behavior, and now the hostilities along its border, make it increasingly difficult to act on such a premise without seeming naïve.

The "archrealist" reference is amusing, like the archdruid he'd like to present himself as. Kissinger has always been a great powers romantic, which is why he's tempted to puff up Russia into a type that can play strategy with the US. I'd have to say that Putin's strategic goals are much more limited, otherwise why would he take risks with such small potatoes as South Ossetia? What's happened is that: on the one hand, Cold War revivalists in the Bush regime have sought to marginalize Russia, even to the point of interfering in local politics in places like Georgia and the Ukraine; on the other hand, Putin recognizes that Yeltsin's decade of subservience to the US was nothing less than an economic and political disaster for Russia. Moreover, since Bush and Putin came to power, the US has entered an embarrassing international decline, while Russia has hugely benefitted, especially from the oil market. This makes Europe and China much more attractive to Russia as partners, and it also gives the diehard US superpower cult all that more reason to try to isolate Russia. A good way to do that is to provoke a backlash of Russian bellicosity, because that fits the cognitive model established during the Cold War; and, Lord knows, nobody would think that the US is the one being bellicose.

Continuing:

People of all political persuasion now seem to get it about Russia. In The Return of History and The End of Dreams, Robert Kagan, the neoconservative foreign policy expert who is advising John McCain, writes of Mr. Putin and his coterie: "Their grand ambition is to undo the post-cold war settlement and to re-establish Russia as a dominant power in Eurasia." Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford who is advising Barack Obama, also views Russia as a premodern, sphere-of-influence power. He attributes Russia's hostility to further NATO expansion less to geostrategic calculations than to what he says is Mr. Putin's cold war mentality. The essential Russian calculus, he says, is, "Anything we can do to weaken the U.S. is good for Russia."

That's the whole political spectrum? That's like saying the whole alphabet from A to F. The McFaul quote (whoever the hell he is) shows nothing more than the essential essence of paranoia: the belief that everything someone else does is really about us. There's also a big chunk of projection there: whatever Russia can do to weaken us is vanishingly trivial compared to what a president like Bush can do (and has done).

I don't mean to defend Putin here, but we do need to understand the context he's working in, and that his actions are not unprovoked and not completely irrational. (This isn't the first time this has happened. Everyone knows that Russia invaded Afghanistan, but hardly anyone realizes that they did so only after the US started arming insurgents against the pro-Soviet Afghan government, let alone that one reason why Carter did that was to provoke the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, thus serving them with "their own Vietnam." While the costs seem carefree at the time, we've never stopped paying for that bit of hubris, as now Afghanistan has turned back into our second (or third) Vietnam.)

One thing you can say about Putin is that he certainly doesn't believe that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Putin built his career on squashing breakaway Chechnya. The Chechens had achieved de facto autonomy in the mid-1990s, much like South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Second Chechen War, informally "Putin's War," was launched under very dubious circumstances -- in response to "Chechen terrorist attacks," widely believed to have been set by Putin's own agents -- and resulted in the end of Chechen independence, but not before Chechens really did launch a horrifying series of terror attacks.

The Russian Empire grew from a small area around Moscow in the 1400s to stretch from Poland in eastern Europe to the Pacific coast, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caucusus Mountains and the borders of Iran and China in the south. Russia did this by conquering hundreds of ethnic groups, which the Soviet Union organized into 15 SSRs and numerous "autonomous" regions under them, especially in the Russian Federation (RFSSR). The borders were never perfect, and were further perturbed by political whims, and by Stalin's wholesale relocations of unruly populations (e.g., the Chechens were moved to Siberia for several decades, one of many reasons they wanted to break free). In 1991, the Soviet Union split along SSR lines, partly because some SSRs were pulling away (the Baltic states, Armenia), and partly because it suited Boris Yeltsin's political ambitions. That left many smaller political units with the idea of breaking free too. In particular, the potential unraveling of Russia could have been extreme. The result has been a series of wars of independence and preservation: much as the Russians hated to lose Chechnya, the Georgians hate having lost Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

I have no particular opinion on these conflicts, except that they should be settled by some means other than war, and that it is inappropriate for outsiders (including the US) to take sides. I don't see a fundamental problem with splitting countries into ethnic enclaves, especially when it's done agreeably as was the case of Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, the forces behind such splits are generally nationalist, presenting a number of problems: they tend to be right-wing, with all that implies; in particular, they tend to be authoritarian, chauvinist, and repressively anti-minority. Living in the US, I'm used to the idea of a country where many different kinds of people can live in relatively cosmopolitan harmony. I also appreciate that a large country with freedom of movement has a lot of economic advantages over small countries, so one thing I'll note is that breakaway countries often take a big step backwards in terms of living standards. (Turkish Cyprus and Serbian Bosnia are two obvious basket cases; South Ossetia is probably another.) For a while it looked like Quebec might secede from Canada, but they compromised on cultural points to keep the economy intact. If Georgia were to develop the European standard of living they aspire to, you'd think they'd be able to woo Abkhazia and South Ossetia back. But marching your army in to force reunion doesn't accomplish a thing, and it does no credit to Georgia's reputation as a modern, liberal democracy. Anyone who encourages Georgia to take that path is nuts, or has come other agenda. Like McCain. Few other issues show so clearly how dangerous and deranged he really is.