Putin's successful entrapment of Georgia

Cathy Young provides more background on the Russian-Georgian conflict:

. . . this is not a situation with two equally valid opposing views of reality, or with roughly balanced rights and wrongs on both sides. True, on a political level, there are no real good guys in this conflict; the only true innocents are the ordinary people caught in the crossfire. But there are bad guys — and, at least in the short term, they seem to be the likely winners.

Mikheil Saakashvili — the pro-Western, pro-U.S. president of Georgia who was swept to power in 2003 in one of the peaceful, grassroots "color revolutions" that so rattled the Kremlin — is no liberal hero. Since 2007, he has moved to squelch the opposition and shut down the independent media, depicting his critics as puppets of Moscow in much the same way Putin has depicted his opponents as hirelings of the West. Saakashvili's decision to send troops to take control of South Ossetia and shell its capital Tskhinvali, though undertaken in response to a series of Russian provocations, was not only a major strategic blunder but also an assault on an area heavily populated by civilians.

Russia's military response, which most likely inflicted further damage on the South Ossetian population while repelling Georgian troops, quickly turned into an all-out assault on Georgia itself — a clear-cut punitive strike against a recalcitrant former colony that has been a major irritant to the ruling clique in the Kremlin, and to Putin himself.

I'm still of the opinion that Georgia is less the direct target of Russia's overall policy than just being the unlucky subject of an object lesson to other former Soviet states (Ukraine, this one's for you). There's absolutely no doubt that Russia could easily crush Georgia's military forces and conquer the country. The Americans can offer nothing but token aid to Georgia and would be extremely foolhardy to go beyond the medical supplies already dispatched.

In the short term, Russia has almost certainly secured permanent eviction of the Georgians from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and demonstrated that any attempt — military or diplomatic — to reverse the process will be met with immediate escalation beyond what Georgia can sustain.

As for Georgia's request to join NATO, Russia's immediate goal of proving NATO to be too far away to help (and too timorous to try) has been achieved. Ukraine's attention is being directed to the same lesson.