Bush rebuking Russia? Putin must be splitting his sides - by Simon Jenkins
Putin would die laughing if he read this week's American newspapers. The president, George Bush, declared the Russian invasion of Georgia "disproportionate and unacceptable". This is taken as a put-down to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who declared the invasion "will not go unanswered", apparently something quite different. Bush says that great powers should not go about "toppling governments in the 21st century", as if he had never done such a thing. Cheney says that the invasion has "damaged Russia's standing in the world", as if Cheney gave a damn. The lobby for sanctions against Russia is reduced to threatening to boycott the winter Olympics. Big deal.What is clear is that the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is a poor advertisement for a Columbia University education. He thought he could reoccupy South Ossetia and call Russia's bluff while Putin was away at the Olympics. He found it was not bluff. Putin was waiting for just such an invitation to humiliate a man he loathes, and to deter any other Russian border state from applying to join Nato, an organization Russia had itself sought to join until it was rudely rebuffed.
Saakashvili thought he could call on the support of his neoconservative allies in Washington. Tbilisi is one of the few world cities in which Bush's picture is a pin-up and where an avenue is named after him. It turned out that such "support" was mere words.
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