Pretty amazing pictures from Georgia, where the Russian tanks are on the roll again, prompting dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin…
This all for a separatist province with a population of….60,000. That’s about the same as Guildford.
I was wondering, if Russia invades South Ossetia, as it has, if that is technically an act of war – it’s a separatist province, after all, that denies it is part of Georgian territory, so it’s debatable whether this is an infringement of Georgian territory. But then Putin helpfully clarified matters. ‘War has started’, he said. Good, glad we got that cleared up.
The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, has been on CNN begging for American assistance. “It’s not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values,” he said. John McCain would no doubt agree, but I’m not sure the American people are that keen to leap to Georgia’s defence, though no doubt the headline ‘Russia invades Georgia’ will alarm some of the hicks down south… ‘Git mah gun, John Boy, the Russkies will be headin’ for Alabama next!’.
Meanwhile George Bush is busy watching the Olympics in Beijing, and is only likely to get really agitated if the Russian tanks roll down the main motorway in Tblisi, which is named after him. Russian tanks on George Bush highway, that would be something.
It’s notable that Saakashvili didn’t even mention the EU. This is, after all, the first war on European soil since the Yugoslav War of the 1990s. A decade on, and the EU is still nowhere near being able to police its own backyard.
