What Will Never Happen

He's right, of course, Krauthammer, with his plan to muzzle the Russian bear. Invade Georgia to a chorus of indignant and impotent -- I should say erectily dysfunctional -- snortings? Bad Russian bear, bad! What a pathetic display of futile posing.

Krauthammer lists a short series of intelligent and potentially effective non-military responses. That non-military part is important. Who needs another war? Even one that will never happen, cuz we're afraid of another WWI and Vietnam and, uh, all those other pointless wars that we keep on losing the peace of. No more war! -- especially about something as obscure and unimportant as breakaway provinces in breakaway former-soviets. It's like a soap opera, all these names and characters and all this history and plots and story lines and suchlike. Evil twins and returns from the dead. How gnostic. How Manichean.

So Krauthammer proposes the following:

1. suspend the NATO-Russian Council that gives Russia a seat at the NATO table ... it wouldn't be an expulsion, just some time off, a little trial separation, you know, to give us some space, maybe see someone else for a while, nothing serious though;
2. "bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization" -- clear enough: a little neighborhood watch thing, like not renting out your garage-apartment to crack dealers;
3. dissolve the G-8 by simply withdrawing from it and reconstituting the G-7 -- Russia can be its own G-1 ... Putin sucked all the air out of the room anyway;
4. plan to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where ever the hell that is ... oh, "15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia" ... yeah, that; and
5. declare that any removal of the pro-Western Saakashvili government will "lead to recognition of a government-in-exile. This would instantly be understood as providing us the legal basis for supplying and supporting a Georgian resistance to any Russian-installed regime."

All good ideas that will have an effect. Oops, pardon my sloppy diction. That WOULD have an effect, if they were to happen, which they won't, cuz no one really cares. Not enough to sacrifice all that goodwill that doing nothing wins from Russia. I mean, they have oil, and we mustn't trouble the waters by spilling oil on it, or some such mixed and very clever if somewhat sloppy metaphor that I'll work out and insert here later, sometime after you've read this. It's just that nothing but talk and ineffective symbolism will be employed. You know, diplomacy, of the sort that Obama is always hinting at and urging so eloquently.

Russia holds all the cards, you see, because it is now a single step away from controlling the entire Caspian oil supply that feeds Europe. Europe will always invite the sodomite to have its way with the West, so long as it can glut itself however modestly with oil. Donnez-nous du pétrole. Wir müssen Öl. That's how the rich keep getting richer. Who should know this better than socialists and communists? Russia now owns the rope that we will buy from it to hang ourselves with.

This casual, feckless, insouciant non-response does send one clear signal. No, Iraq won't be invading Kuwait. But China will be invading Taiwan, in the near future. Why not? Hm. Let's see. Who will Iran be invading? And North Korea? We'll just have to wait and see, sitting on our hands here and watching it all as if it were a dramatic sporting event on the TV. That's what politics and life have become, apparently. Something to talk about.


J