Everybody Chill

Everyone's got their panties in a twist over this Russia-Georgia thing. We've been so inundated with this rhetoric that Russia is in shambles because we so totally thumped 'em in the Cold War that we're in shock when we see them flex their muscles.
They flexed their muscles in Afghanistan in the mid-nineties, and nobody cared, because it was just a bunch of towel heads. They flexed their muscles in Serbia and nobody cared, because we wanted Serbia to go down as well. They flexed their muscles in Chechnya, and Bill Clinton tried to get people to care, but our life was going so well at the time that it didn't really seem like anything bad affected us.

All these skirmishes have common threads—they were fights with former Soviet republics, autonomous countries which never really earned their independence, we were just hell-bent on splitting up the old Soviet Union and didn't care that we were essentially creating a litany of rogue states. Every time, the Pentagon would watch, and Russia would pull out weapons we'd never heard of, and just mop the floor with whoever they were fighting. When they took on Afghanistan, they knew it would be a tough fight, so they started pulling out weapons you see in science-fiction movies: suitcase bombs, roving missile launchers, heat-seeking blanket missiles. Bill Clinton tried to warn us, and even sent troops to defend our then-allies, but Americans accused Clinton of making it all up to distract us from Lewinsky.

The skirmish in Georgia is practically identical to Desert Storm. Georgia stepped into a territory they didn't own, announced that they were running the place, and killed anyone who disagreed with them. The territory was a protectorate of Russia (like Guam or Panama is to us), so Russia came in to end the conflict. Here's how Russia ends a conflict: they go in full force and just clean the place out. They flatten anyone who isn't waving a white flag. They finished the job in five days.

If we had used the same tactic in Iraq, we would be 5 trillion dollars richer, the world would be more stable, and we wouldn't have the widespread animosity of the world we do today.

We care now, though, because Georgia isn't a foreign sounding name. We've got a state named Georgia. So we could picture Bolsheviks marching on Atlanta. And while the Russians gave up on their quest to spread communism after they lost the Cold War, we are continuing our quest to impose our government on the entire world, and are very proud of that fact. Georgia one of the only countries to actually adopt our form of government (constitutional republic), so we feel that any attack on Georgia is an attack on us. In fact, we even tried to get Georgia to join NATO, an effort which was vetoed by NATO for this exact reason—because Georgia takes this confidence that the US will back them unconditionally and exploits it, intentionally drawing the ire of the Sleeping Bear. They knew they were going to get the shit kicked out of them, and they did, and they had no problem having 300 Georgians killed a day, because they wanted the attention that we obediently gave them.

When a child throws a temper tantrum in the middle of Safeway because you won't buy him a candy bar, what happens when you give in and buy him the Twix? That's why you don't start stirring up shit with Russia because our little protege in Eastern Europe is throwing a tantrum. Like it or not, Russia is still their daddy, and they don't buy them candy bars—they give them a spanking.