8-11-08—The crisis in the Caucasus spread to Iraq when Georgian troops began returning home to fight the Russians, leaving American commanders scrambling to figure out how to replace them [..which] will be difficult. The 2000 strong Georgian contingent was the third-largest foreign force in Iraq, and Georgia, unlike most of the other coalition countries, allowed its forces to carry out dangerous missions near the Iraqi-Iranian border. WSJ,A11
--8-11-08...by preparing Georgian soldiers for duty in Iraq, the US appeared to have helped embolden Georgia, if inadvertently, to enter a fight it could not win. American officials and a military official who have dealt with Georgia said privately that as a result, the war risked becoming a political catastrophe for the US, whose image and authority ion the region were in question after it had proven unable to assit Georgia or to strain the Kremlin while the Russian army pressed its attack. NYT A10
-. . . overall the result is easy to predict: a regulatory pole will emerge in Eurasia, one closer to the geographic center of the world, and there will be a slowdown in the flow of goods, capital, and migration that currently nourishes the United States. The United States will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population. . . We must not forget two important related truths: as in the past, the true forces today are linked to demographics and education, and true power is economic. It serves no purpose to lose one’s way in a real or imaginary military competition with the United States that would require endless incursions within countries of no real strategic importance. We should not follow America’s military leaders for whom the term “theatre of operations” has ceased being a metaphor. Fighting alongside the Americans in Iraq would only amount to playing a small role in a bloody vaudeville show. . . Let the present America expend what remains of its energy, if that is what it wants to do, on “war on terrorism”---a substitute battle for the perpetuation of a hegemony that it has already lost. If it stubbornly decides to continue showing off its supreme power, it will only end up exposing to the world its powerlessness. [Todd, AFTER EMPIRE (2003) 199,202]
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