Georgia Matters!!!!

There was a article out of Southern Mississippi paper that caught my eye today at ESCAPE FROM GEORGIA: Ocean Springs woman gathers prayers for son. Her son is in the Peace Corp and has a Georgian wife and is now trying to escape with her. This part at the end caught my eye:

On Monday, four days into the fighting as Russia seized several towns and a military base deep in western Georgia, Lee Allen evacuated family and friends from one town where they had a family home to his flat elsewhere in the country.

As time drew near for Lee and his wife to leave, he could no longer call via cell phone because the Russians had bombed nearby cell towers, Melanie Allen said. But she has received several e-mails.

Lee Allen and his wife had each packed a bag with the minimum of belongings. They had been sleeping in their clothes in case they had to run from their flat in the middle of the night because of bombings.

"We had a couple of very garbled phone conversations yesterday," Melanie Allen said Tuesday. "In one e-mail he said he feels like he's abandoning ship, but at the same time, it's time to come home."

Lee told his mother that under the guise of doing humanitarian work in the region, the Russians had recently rebuilt a central railroad line, which they then used to transport troops and weapons for the invasion.

I guess times like this really show my age. I guess I am now realizing that there is sizeable part of the population that does not recall with much detail Soviet troops and tanks in Poland the repression.

This Crisis has shown some of the interesting divisions in Conservative thought. The more Paleo contingent has been almost been looking at this at glee with seems. As sort of payback for Bush's "naive" dream of democracy in places far away. It might be real 1980's but I am siding with the freedom loving poles and other places of Eastern Europe that are sticking by Georgia. It seems that for some people it is bad politics and bad policy to support a country that likes us!!!

A Russian Reporter basically tried to tell Sec. Rice yesterday that the United States was wrong. Her response was classic and correct

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, many people in Washington would say what you did after 9/11 was very disproportionate to the threat and to the actual loss that you incurred. So the Russians are trying to ensure the security of their forces and their citizens and their peacekeepers. And they – they are moving, they are creating a buffer zone. What’s wrong with that? Why can’t you do this in --

SECRETARY RICE: I am not going to sit here and judge each Russian military operation. I am going to say that when you start bombing ports and threatening to bomb airfields and bombing a city like Gori and bringing troops in a flanking maneuver on the western flank of Georgia and tying up the main roads between Georgia – between Tbilisi and Gori, that’s well beyond anything that is needed to protect Russian peacekeepers. And that is why Russia is starting to face international condemnation for what it is doing.

This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it. Things have changed. And so, what Russia, I think, is seeing is that to the degree that this is about South Ossetia, about even Abkhazia, let’s accept that it is time to move the forces back. Let’s accept that it’s -- first to end the fighting, move the forces back to August 6th, and then have an international mediation to try to resolve these conflicts within the context of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Georgia.

Amen to that.!!!

Wheat & Weeds has John McCain's stirring statement McCain: We're All Georgians I agree totally. I am also pleased that Obama is issuing statements about as strongas McCains.

I think this Louisiana blogger pretty much sums up the situation quite well