The Bear Went Down To Georgia

If you haven’t already encountered it elsewhere, folks interested in the why’s and wherefore’s of Russia’s invasion of Georgia might want to check out this assessment published (and made freely available) by Stratfor.

Stratfor is a private specialist in geopolitical intelligence.  The subscription price for full access to their articles is too rich for my blood, but I have found their publicly-released articles and teasers interesting in the past….although I don’t always agree with their analysis.

For example, on the Georgia mess, Stratfor opines:

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

Granted, I’m no expert on Georgia…but from other sources, I had developed the impression that the trigger for the Russian invasion, Georgia’s drive to stifle long-simmering secessionism, could easily be a manifestation of nationalism blinding leaders, triggering bad decisions.

I’d discount Stratfor’s assessment…except wasn’t it dogged adherence to bad intelligence which officially got us into the mess in Iraq?

Oh well.   If the coming homestretch for the general election campaign needed a little spice to liven things up, the cries of hawks demanding up-sizing of the military in order to respond to such affronts to American interests, budget-be-damned should make the foreign policy debate more interesting.

I note that the Air Force’s hyped Cyber Command has been shelved.  While I’m aware that that decision could be a reflection of inter-bureaucracy turf-squabbling and a desire to not duplicate other entities’ efforts….well, if we’re transitioning to a period of history where Russia is our adversary again, shouldn’t we be beefing up domestic network security from the potential antics of the Russian (and Chinese) hacker corps?