What nations do.

"This isn't 1968."

That was Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice just before embarking on her diplomatic mission to Georgia (the Republic of), to carry a cease fire agreement and presumably get a first-hand look at the smoldering ruins of yet another brilliant foreign policy initiative, this time played out in the region of her supposed expertise. If she was at all aware of the irony in her statement, she certainly gave no hint of it. She was, of course, referring to the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia (a country still very much in John McCain's world atlas) as a means of calling out Russia on its brutal violation of a neighboring nation's sovereignty. In her eagerness to link present-day Russia with the Soviet invasion of four decades ago, she appears to have forgotten somewhat more recent history... like her own administration's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequent occupation of both countries; like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of millions as a result of said invasion. If her point is, as she put it, that it is no longer acceptable for nations to behave in this way, this new order must be a very recent development. News of it has yet to reach Washington.

Because she is not technically "stupid," I assume what she's saying is that nowadays only the United States can act as though we own the world and can invade any country we want without provocation. This comports with the "what we say goes" principle articulated by her husb... I mean, her boss's father some 17 years ago or so. Of course, there are many ways in which this is quite a bit like 1968. If you cast your mind back to that awful year, you might ask yourself if the Soviets were the only ones rampaging through a sovereign country. The answer would be, well, not as such. Our military was in the fourth year of a far more brutal invasion of Vietnam, reducing that nation and its immediate neighbors to "a land of ruin and wreck", as Arthur Schlesinger put it, with an expeditionary force of more than half a million and the most devastating campaign of sustained aerial bombing in history. We now appear to be just as stuck in Iraq as we were in Southeast Asia in 1968, for reasons every bit as illegitimate.

It's not surprising to hear our leaders speaking arrogantly or ignorantly - or with a presumption of ignorance on our parts. Nor is it surprising to hear a hallelujah chorus of pundits, journalists, and pols deploring this notion of invading another country while never once referring to the Iraq exemption. (Aggravating, but not surprising.) What did sort of astound me over the past few days was the impossibly ham-fisted timing of our pact with the Polish government to base "missile defense" (a.k.a. "defense contractor defense") within their national territory, something the Russians (and many Poles) deplore. I truly believe the administration hopes for war to break out - that seems to work for them. No one could be that incompetent. (Or... could they... ?) I think back to Israel's attack on Lebanon two years ago, when Condi Rice and company were actually blocking a cease fire. The bombing and abortive invasion were the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East, we were told then. Perhaps Russia will argue with similar conviction that their overreaction in Georgia amounts to the birth pangs of a new Southeastern Europe.

Hey - Russia was invaded twice in the last century, and they're still a little sensitive to adversarial military alliances on their borders. Maybe we should be trying to ratchet this down a little... before somebody else gets hurt, eh?

luv u,

jp