I get these briefings for free from Stratfor, and they sent me a briefing (pdf) that said:

It was therefore no accident that the Russians invaded Georgia on Aug. 8 following a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. Forgetting the details of who did what to whom, the United States had created a massive window of opportunity for the Russians

This service (which I read) is allegedly “the world’s leading online publisher of geopolitical intelligence“.  And they sell their briefings at $349 a year.  That said, I think it is obvious that they don’t like Russia.  Stratfor believes that the United States should be the top dog, and do whatever the people running the United States want to do, without any reasonable check (don’t pretend that you think the American voters are a check on the government).

I realize that many people believe the courts to be a check on the government, but the courts only go as far as the judges let them go, and that usually doesn’t mean challenging the foriegn policy decisions.   And let’s face it, there were over 1000 U.S. Personnel in Georgia when South Ossetia was attacked.

I mean Russia got top secret Israeli Defense Force material from Georgia, and the Russians also got top secret NATO communication equipment as well.  It seems like these Georgian forces were plugged into the whole US-Israeli military system.

And it’s really not fair to compare this situation with Kosovo, in Kosovo, there was no mass slaughter of United States citizens, so the comparison is not even close.   In fact, I think that the Russians viewed it more as we did the World Trade Center attacks, but not very many people want to look at the world from some else’s point of view, so I will probably be villified for comparing anything to that incident.

And that is part of the problem, that people (including myself) have an inability to look at situations from different sides, to see how other people might be effected by what we do or say.  It’s the same way in the vast world as it is in our own lives, we see things from our point of view, and get caught up in the prevailing paridigm (or our own inertia).

In my opinion Russia did not want to increase the threat level, but it wants to be dealt fairly with, and that is something that the United States has not really been doing.  There was a lot of money to be made during the cold war, and now that relations with Russia have frozen over again, the friends of Condolezza Rice are singing happy days are here again.

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