No, that’s not my advice, it’s William Kristol’s in the New York Times:
No, that’s not my advice, it’s William Kristol‘s in the New York Times:
Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.
For that matter, consider the implications of our turning away from Georgia for other aspiring pro-Western governments in the neighborhood, like Ukraine’s. Shouldn’t we therefore now insist that normal relations with Russia are impossible as long as the aggression continues, strongly reiterate our commitment to the territorial integrity of Georgia and Ukraine, and offer emergency military aid to Georgia?
Emphasis mine, although I’m not sure how you could read those two paragraphs and put the emphasis anywhere else. This advice has the virtue of clarity, even if it is devoid of all the other big virtues. It goes spectacularly beyond what even John McCain proposed in his quicker, more-hawkish-than-Obama response to the South Ossetia war. And it would transform a Georgia-Russia war into a Russia-U.S. war in about a second and a half. If you like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing you’ll like.
COMPARISON-SHOPPER UPDATE: When even the Daily Telegraph is more dovish, you know you’re a hawk.