Intrepid reader BB has this, in response to my recent post on the petite guerre in Georgia:
Equating military preparedness and war planning as the cause of the conflict is specious. You can not possibly think that the Pentagon does not have contingency plans for attacking nearly everyone.
To which I reply: planning is one thing. Preparedness is another. The one can be accomplished in minutes. The later takes days or weeks. There is no way Russia could have launched its efficient attack on Georgia without moving men and material into position for weeks or months.
But the bigger issue is what this says about the new Russia. Strobe Talbott has a very good piece of what this means about the near the future of the region. From the Washington Post:
An accurate comparison between the Balkan disasters of the 1990s and the one now playing out in the Caucasus underscores what is most ominous about current Russian policy. Seventeen years ago, the Soviet Union came apart at the seams more or less peacefully. That was overwhelmingly because Boris Yeltsin insisted on converting the old inter-republic boundaries into new international ones. In doing so, he kept in check the forces of revanchism among communists and nationalists in the Russian parliament (which went by the appropriately atavistic name "the Supreme Soviet").
Meanwhile, Yugoslavia collapsed into bloody chaos because its leaders engaged in an ethnically and religiously based land-grab. Milosevic, as the best-armed of the lot, tried to carve a "Greater Serbia" out of the flanks of Bosnia and Croatia. If Yeltsin had gone that route, seeking to create a Greater Russia that incorporated Belarus and the parts of Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan and the Baltic states populated by Russian speakers, there could have been conflict across 11 time zones with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the mix.
A question that looms large in the wake of the past week is whether Russian policy has changed with regard to the permanence of borders. That seemed to be what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was hinting yesterday when he said, "You can forget about any discussion of Georgia's territorial integrity."
And there you have it. Boris Yeltsin, fat and fond of drink, saved countless souls by letting go. Vladimir Putin, lean and hungry, seems bent on turning his borders into a ring of little Bosnias, only with the bad guys winning this time. Welcome to the 21st century.
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