Georgia is only the start

Keith

Your leader there looks like an entry for Pseuds Corner in Private Eye.. 'soar over the battlefield of confusion'etc. Have you forgotten Plain English?

TrevorH

Russia has shot itself in the foot.

Putin exposed as an ignorant crude KGB bully.

They had their chance - membership of the G8 etc. They have shown themselves to be unchanged.

Even the biggest of numpties can see that. Treat them in future the way they deserve to be treated.

Alexc

OBN if anything, however I'm going to read it on Matthew's repeated recommendation and hopefully Bobbitt is worthy of the praise.

Craig

Bobbitt concludes that Russia and China need to be included in any future international organisations, which I think is right. The reality is that these are powerful countries, who need us as we need them, and we have enough problems as it is.

David Lindsay

Oh, for goodness sake!

It is one thing that those who were once "neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism" are now "neither Christianity (and thus its age-old bulwark, Russia) nor Islam, but Global Capitalism". But what the hell is your excuse?

The good guys have won this war. They were not the guys backed by George Bush.

Ted Tedford

David Lindsay: Another interesting contribution.

I very strongly doubt that the Christianity to which Putin's Russia is your preferred bulwark will be a terribly great ally in your highly esoteric battle against Islam.

Unless he wants to try the 'Kosovo sui generis' arguments that the UK employed to secure K Albanian independence, Putin's fight 'for' South Ossetia logically endorses the right to self-determination of Chechnya. Chechnya has far more demonstrable and deadly links to Islamist groups than anything Kosovo can produce, even in the wildest dreams of the Yemen, Saudi, Iran, and the other regimes attempting, unsuccessfully thus far, to radicalise it. And that in spite of (because of?) Putin's punitive campaigns to prevent its secession.

By all means rail against the supra-national elites, but be careful who you embrace instead.

David Lindsay

They are all of a piece, Ted Tedford.

The neocons pose as the bulwarks against Islam when they are not in fact any such thing:

- they support or have supported in every way the causes of Islamic secession in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya;

- they are closely allied to Pakistan and to the Gulf monarchies, not least including Wahhabi Arabia;

- they have created an Islamist insurgency where there had been none in Iraq, and they are threatening to do the same thing in Syria;

- they suck up to the once and (near) future Caliphate of Turkey, which is itself behind the attempted Islamic secession in the north of Cyprus; and

- they promote an economic system which depends on mass migration from the Islamic world to the West.

When the age-old bulwark of the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is the real West (and that role has certainly not passed to America, founded by Deists on the strict separation of Church and State, the former revered by sleepy American Christians and the latter treated by them as if it were a Biblical principle) recognises the right of Nagorno-Karabakh to do a Kosovo, and backs up that recognition to the hilt, then which side will the neocons be on, and why?

Herbert Thornton

Most people on South Ossetia are Russian citizens. It seems that some people want Russia to leave them to their fate, in much the same way as Britain abandoned British farmers in Zimbabwe.