NonProphet posted recently about Gorbachev’s Op-Ed in the New York Times about Georgia. It’s hard to criticize a nobel peace prize winner (oh, unless you’re a Republican and you’re talking about Jimmy Carter), but look at it this way: South Ossetia was artificially severed from North Ossetia by Stalin. It used to be one nation. In fact, most of the borders in that region are the result of Stalin’s desire to *create* ethnic tensions.

He figured that as long as these peoples continued to fight each other they wouldn’t be hankering for “freedoms” or otherwise bothering him. BUT, if you sew the two Ossetias back together again, the Russians (who are more closely aligned with the Ossetians) can move military equipment right to the southern borders and easily threaten Tblisi, Georgia. Clearly Georgia (and Isreal and the west, which have interests in the pipeline through Georgia) wish to keep some geographical border between Russia and the capital. The only way to do this is to tighten the grip on South Ossetia. If, like Isreal, they can seed enough little villages of ethnic Georgians there that the tension raises to a level that gives them an excuse to invade, even better. The fact that the US may have actually pushed the Georgians to this conclusion seems to have gotten lost in the news, but it was being talked about earlier in the month, and Gorbachev suggests it too. The problem is, Russia was obviously well prepared and standing ready to invade. The amount of armor they rolled in with cannot be called up in a day or two - they were not surprised by the Georgian “raid” into South Ossetia at all. Smells like a setup to me, to make Russia look like the bad guy and create a sense of cold war again (and if it scared Poland into signing that treaty for the missle defense system, so much the better I guess, right?). I work with a lot of Polish, Ukrainians, as well as Russians. They are in constant contact with folks back home and can read all those cryptic Cyrillic websites on lunch. It’s been a very interesting couple weeks at work. The Ukrainians and Polish are scared to death that the old Soviet Union will soon be marching back into their countries, while the Russians consider the Georgians an unruly, scary mob of mafiosos who dance around with knives in their mouths that would sooner cut you down as look at you (if you cross them). While I was brought up to fear the USSR, I have grown to be slightly suspicious of any non-English speaking foreign nation with a leader that speaks perfect English.