Go-to Guy for Georgia

For my money, the go-to-guy on Georgia right now is Mark Kleiman at Reality-Based Community. Start here and work back or (if you are reading this tomorrow) work forward. Everybody else seems to be struggling to get on the right foot here; Kleiman seems to have had it figured out for the start.

Afterthought: Well, I did also enjoy Richard Holbrooke with Margaret Warner on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer--not least his willingness to call Dimitri Simes a liar to his face (link). Here's Holbrook:

The Russians spent two years provoking Russia -- provoking Georgia. Maybe they sucker-punched Georgia; we're not sure. But the timing, the action, the unbelievable brutality of it, reminiscent of Prague '68, Budapest '56, is heartbreaking.

And I want to stress, closing this. I'm not a warmonger, and I don'twant a new Cold War any more than Dimitri does. We've worked togetherin the past. We both share a vision of Russia as an important part of the world, seeking solutions to climate change, energy, and stability.

But this is a chilling effect. The Russians wish to re-establish a historic area of hegemony that includes Ukraine. And it is no accident that the other former Soviet republics are watching this andextraordinarily upset, as Putin progresses with an attempt to re-create a kind of a hegemonic space.