The Russians hold all the cards militariily and it has only been, IMHO, the couragous actions of the Presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the strong talk and actions of president Bush using the US military for humanitarian efforts that slowed and then stopped the Russian juggernaught.
Bush has learned too late to prevent this crisis from happening, but perhaps in time to quell it, what a fool Putin took him for.
Sadly, Clintons foolish actions in Kosovo, and then Bush's equally foolish recognition of Kosovo have probably paved the way for the detaching of both provinces from Georgia, leaving her teribly open to aggression by the Russians.
We have to first stop the current onslaught and then rearm Georgia, admit her (and the Ukraine) into NATO, and then provide NATO or US bases there as a trip against further Russian ambitions.
I believe we can do that and should do that. I hope and pray we will do that...the Georgians, their quest for freedom, and their loayalty to us deserve it.
Yours may be the silliest comment I've ever read. All the Russians have are huge numbers of tanks, jets, soldiers and warships. Europe has hundreds of diplomats, each with years of practical experience at expressing their strong disapproval and drafting increasingly firm warnings. I am confident that the UN will meet all of our expectations in this crisis; after all, this precise situation is why we created the UN in the first place.
Russia is flush with oil and oil money. Europe gets a large percent of their oil and gas from Russia and the mid-east (incl Iran). We here in the US import upwards of 70% of our oil.
We can't get into any major conflicts with the possibility of our oil supply being cut off. And Nancy Pelosi wants to release oil from our reserve to lower fuel costs.
If we don't get our own oil/energy supplies on-line, we may just get run over.
Beside the US, who in NATO has a military that could fight a major war? And we want to commit ourselves to defending states landlocked in Eurasia against Russia? If Georgia was in NATO, we still could not have done anything. Most of the European Union would just have bailed.
We need to make the EU take a serious interest in its own defense. We can not patrol the world. No nation that has ever tried that ended well.