It's said that Russia's response to Georgia's attack on South Ossetia is disproportionate: we hear of "Western leaders anxiously watching for a withdrawal and puzzling over how to punish Moscow for what they called a disproportionate reaction to the Georgian offensive". No one has asked whether a disproportionate reaction or response is always wrong.

War, or an armed attack, can itself be a disproportionate response to some offense. If Britain, for example, declared war on Sweden for producing Abba, that would be disproportionate. It would also be wrong, because Abba isn't cause enough for initiating violence. Britain could at least ask for a large indemnity first. The Nuremberg tribunals placed aggression, a "crime against peace", ahead of war crimes. Perhaps this was meant to remind us that wars usher in far worse than war-fevered cheerleaders suppose, and are virtually always an immoral and disproportionate response to offences...

There is also a relationship between war as an immorally disproportionate response, or starting war for the wrong reasons, and all its consequences. When you start a war for the wrong reasons, you are responsible for all that follows, even the other side's atrocities. Though the other side is to blame for its crimes, so are you. You don't even have the right to kill in self-defense. If you are wrong to start a war, you don't suddenly fall into the right just because, contrary to your expectations, it's you, not the other guy, who has to defend himself.

War is not like self-defense in civilian life, when the response must be proportionate to the threat... The unacceptably disproportionate response was Georgia's in starting the war, not Russia's in finishing it. [More]

Republican candidate for U.S. President John McCain makes much of his military service in the Vietnam war but some veterans of that war don't make much of him, or his actions.

Does Bush believe that ‘victory,’ which to him is apparently an Iraq with a western-style democracy, forced upon it against the will of the people, has been achieved? That is too much of a stretch even for the intellectually-challenged Mr. Bush to believe. But using Hitler’s ‘Big Lie’ theory, perhaps he hopes that U.S. citizens will buy it.

The ‘Big Lie’ theory comes from Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, and is this: "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation… more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” So if Mr. Bush would have us believe that a new democratic Iraq is dawning, he is telling ‘the big lie.’

But perhaps neither of these explains the president’s apparent willingness to accept a troop withdrawal timeline (he calls it a time ‘horizon,’ apparently believing that the U.S. citizenry is too stupid to know he means timeline). The youthful, dynamic Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is ahead in the polls; his Republican opponent, the awkward, elderly and decrepit John McCain, has not been able to spark any excitement on the campaign trail. McCain is a stalwart supporter of war, any war it seems, and foresees the U.S. occupation in Iraq lasting for generations. Perhaps it has finally dawned on Bush that this is not what the American people want; perhaps someone has finally gotten through to him; perhaps someone has penetrated his inner circle of yes-men and women, and has made him realize that a campaign platform of more of the same death, blood and destruction, is not selling too well even in middle America. [More]

Did the Georgians think they could attack Ossetia, kill civilians and Russian peacekeepers, and get away with it? Unless President Saakashvili and the people around him are snorting something that turns reality upside down, they must have known that Georgia’s army was no match for Russia’s.

Could the Georgians have been working under the illusion they had the full backing of the U.S? What Condoleezza Rice told Saakashvili during her July 10 trip becomes critical. Did she really tell the Georgians in private not to attack as she claims? Or did Tbilisi take Rice’s public rhetoric supporting Georgia’s claim of sovereignty at face value? Shortly before Georgia attacked, the Russians tried to get a resolution through the UN Security Council calling on Ossetia and Georgia to renounce the use of force. The U.S., Britain, and Saakashvili torpedoed it. Why? Might the U.S. have snookered the Georgians into making an attack Washington knew would end in disaster?

Political commentator Robert Scheer suggests the war was a neocon election ploy aimed at getting John McCain elected president... Is the Georgia War the “October surprise”? The Republicans need a crisis so they can argue that only McCain has the experience to handle it. The Iran bugaboo is wearing thin, and the polls show overwhelming opposition to a war with Teheran. China is playing nice, and, in any case, it is not a good idea to pick a fight with someone who can call in its loans and bankrupt you. But there is always the big, bad Russian bear. [More]

RENATE OGILVIE gives some historical context to the conflict in Georgia, a crisis that could put heat back into the Cold War.

The American-armed and trained Georgian army swarmed into South Ossetia last Thursday, killing an estimated 2,000 civilians, sending 40,000 South Ossetians fleeing over the Russian border, and destroying much of the capital, Tskhinvali. The attack was unprovoked and took place a full 24 hours before even ONE Russian soldier set foot in South Ossetia. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Americans still believe that the Russian army invaded Georgian territory first. The BBC, AP, New York Times and the rest of the establishment media have consistently and deliberately misled their readers into believing that the violence in South Ossetia was initiated by the Kremlin. Let's be clear, it wasn't. In truth, there is NO dispute about the facts except among the people who rely the western press for their information...

Russia deployed its tanks and troops to South Ossetia to save the lives of civilians and to reestablish the peace. Period. It has no interest in annexing the former-Soviet country or in expanding its present borders. Now that the Georgian army has been routed, Russian president Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin have expressed a willingness to settle the dispute through normal diplomatic channels at the UN. Neither leader is under any illusions about Washington's involvement in the hostilities. They know that Georgian President Mikail Saakashvili is an American stooge who came to power in a CIA-backed coup, the so-called "Rose Revolution", and would never order a major military operation without explicit instructions from his White House puppetmasters.

The Georgian army had no chance of winning a war with Russia or any intention of occupying the territory they captured. The real aim was to lure the Russian army into a trap. US planners hope to do what they did so skillfully in Afghanistan; lure their Russian prey into a long and bloody Chechnya-type fiasco that will pit their Russia troops against guerrilla forces armed and trained by U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The war will be waged in the name of liberating Georgia from Russian imperialism and stopping Putin from achieving his alleged ambition to control critical western-owned pipelines around the Caspian Basin. [More]

For many people the sight of Russian tanks streaming across a border in August has uncanny echoes of Prague 1968. That cold war reflex is natural enough, but after two decades of Russian retreat from those bastions it is misleading. Not every development in the former Soviet Union is a replay of Soviet history. The clash between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, which has escalated dramatically, in truth has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis.

When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain's widely unexpected military response with the comment: "No great power retreats for ever." Maybe Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev... Unlike in eastern Europe, today in breakaway states such as South Ossetia or Abkhazia, Russian troops are popular. Vladimir Putin's picture is more widely displayed than that of the South Ossetian president, the former Soviet wrestling champion Eduard Kokoity. The Russians are seen as protectors against a repeat of ethnic cleansing by Georgians...

Given its extraordinary ethnic complexity, Georgia is a post-Soviet Union in miniature. If westerners readily conceded non-Russian republics' right to secede from the USSR in 1991, what is the logic of insisting that non-Georgians must remain inside a microempire which happens to be pro-western? Other people's nationalisms are like other people's love affairs, or, indeed, like dog fights. These are things wise people don't get involved in. A war in the Caucasus is never a straightforward moral crusade - but then, how many wars are? [More]