Only four months left -and still Dastardly and Muttley are stirring it!

It was yesterday announced that Vice President Dick Dastardly would visit Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Ukraine to 'rally America's friends' after the Russian intervention in South Ossetia. Another masterstroke from the Sultans of Screw-Up adding to their foreign policy successes all around the globe. And now President Muttley has endorsed McCain as the next President. That must have chilled the old fella's blood.






The Americans have failed, thank goodness, to persuade the EC to impose sanctions on Russia - what a mad idea that was - but now insist on sabre rattling on Russia's borders. Can you imagine what would happen should the Russians once more do the same in Cuba or in any of their friendly Latin American states? The aim, it seems is to 'protect' western energy sources, currently pipelined through the pro western former Soviet Union states.

Does this stumbling, bumbling Republican Administration really believe that such actions are going to either protect energy supplies or reassure the countries around Russia that their independence is safe while America postures and NATO exercises are launched on Russia's borders?

This really is foolhardy politics. The Americans should be getting together with their Russian counterparts and really trying to understand the background to the problems of South Ossetia and Abkhazia instead of simply lining up behind convenient alliances and causing more trouble. I do believe that the Russian intervention in South Ossetia was a humanitarian one and I believe the cynical politics was conducted by Georgia when Saakashvili ordered Georgian troops to retake South Ossetia on the day the Olympics opened, hoping to distract the world from what they were doing.

OK I accept that Russia gratefully accepted the opportunity presented to it to teach Georgia a lesson and to say, loud and clear, 'don't think we are a spent force' but does the US seriously believe that an overt American political show of strength in the former Soviet states will either seriously safeguard energy supplies or do anything for stability in the region? There needs to be a new 'real-politik' between the US and Russia where the problems of indigenous ethnic populations in each of these troubled regions is clearly and intelligently discussed and some kind of joint approach agreed on the political diplomacy to be employed to untangle the mess created by the arbitrary borders imposed by the Soviet Union back in 1923

What the US seems to fail to understand is that, for the South Ossetians, the situation is somewhat akin to a lot of American settlers, in what might have been south Texas, English speaking with appropriate cultural habits, being politically incorporated into Mexico and trying for years and years to get out of it and into the US which they felt to be their natural home. What would the US have done in similar circumstances - especially if the Mexican army had raided the region to bring them to heel?

January cannot come too soon for me when , at least, this hideous American administration will be gone. As I have said in other posts, my hope is that Obama becomes President and that maybe..just maybe...America might begin to look intellectually at world politics and make some attempt to understand the complex situation in eastern Europe and, particularly, in the former Soviet Union. The obsession with military might and loud posturing which has earmarked this Administration has done nothing for peace in the world and certainly nothing for America's international reputation.