all gonna feel the pain

Though I can strongly relate to both Nick Carraway and Paul Pennyfeather, the fictional character I identify the most with is Major Clipton from The Bridge on the River Kwai, gazing down at the panorama of broken bodies and twisted wreckage and despairing at the stupidity and waste of it all: "Madness! Madness!"

An American-educated (tossed around by the media like it's a mark of distinction, though there is no shortage of dumbasses the descriptor applies to) leader of Georgia, a Western-friendly former Soviet republic, tries to mobilize domestic support by appealing to nationalism. He decides to retake a breakaway province with a carefully timed surprise attack that less carefully fails to consider the presence of a couple thousand Russian separatist-friendly "peacekeepers" in said province.

The usual stable of neocon loudmouths, feeling rosy with the glow of Cold War nostalgia, offer their expert predictions about how a massive global military power will be humiliated on the battlefield by 18,000 American-trained troops. Russia is happy to put those theories to the test, as the offensive gives them a plum opportunity to soothe its amputee's itch with a liberal dosage of military force, as well as deliver a message to the West and it's former Soviet proxies about fucking around in Russia's traditional spheres of influence.

The Russians defy the experts' proclamations, put the Georgians to flight, and systematically degrade their military infrastructure over the course of a few days. With his country being hammered by an implacable foe, the Georgian leader makes it his solemn responsibility to act like a true leader to his people in their hour of need....by appearing on American television and making hyperbolic pronouncements and chastising the Western powers for not backing him up and/or shielding him from the consequences of his massive lapse in judgement.

His words are echoed by the usual suspects in the media, who dust off the pre-1989 propaganda lexicons (but not, interestingly enough, their history books) and jettison any pretense of objective journalism to engage in some pre-end-of-history style jingoism, weaving the present state of idiocy into a psuedo-historic tapestry which includes the Russian Civil War, World War II, and the 1968 uprising in Prague. It's astonishingly easy to call for military intervention when you're not the one who will be doing the fighting and dying.

And what of the West? A lot of tough talk masking the fact that there's really fuck all they can do without starting World War III, or worse -- without pissing off a major natural gas supplier. The opportunity the conflict provides to bitch out Putin and Company is welcome, but behind the strong words and messages of moral support for the Georgian government is the uncomfortable and unspoken acknowledgement that no one wants to risk a broken nose because his or her reckless buddy picked a fight with the biggest bully in the bar...especially when you've been telling everyone for years that that the bully is no great shakes.

Russia, on the other hand, has shown a great deal of enthusiasm for twisting the knife as long as it's diplomatically feasible, relishing the opportunity to make its rival global powers twist impotently in the wind.

Ah, what a lovely thing geopolitics is, and if the people -- Georgian and South Ossetian -- whose nationalism was exploited to make this happen are the ones who are suffering most, they can take solace in the knowledge that it has all been done for the highest of ideals.

Icon AD - Fight for Peace (from the Don't Feed Us Shit EP, 1982; collected on Lest We Forget, 2006) - A paradox I can get behind.