Sad state of affairs

My guess is that the Russo-Georgian conflict is a situation fraught with intrigue that involves the highest level of the Bush administration, which is completely understandable. At this point, the key question seems to be around just how strongly we encouraged Georgia to push for the recovery of their breakaway republics. Clearly, we were playing a dangerous game, and it looks like we may have mishandled the situation badly.

The real issue, though, is the upshot of it all. Once again, we've been exposed as a toothless enforcer, threatening all sorts of actions that the Russians and the rest of the world know that we can't back up. McCain's highly inflammatory statement that "we are all Georgians now", is truly irresponsible, as Matt Yglesias points out, and President Saakashvili called him out on it:

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

There is no denying the fact that we have lost a great deal of leverage on the international stage. Leave aside the fact that we can no longer hold ourselves out as a beacon of morality, as the stain of Abu Ghraib hangs heavy on our mantle, the larger result of the eight years of the Bush fiasco is that we've been exposed as "all hat and no cattle", as they say in Crawford. Fredrick Kagan, Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney can rant and rave about Russia all they want, the world now knows that our words are hollow slogans, and that there is little that we can do to change events on our own. There was always wisdom in the notion that collective action is imperative in international affairs, and it will take an Obama administration to return this country to that sort of sanity.