Preface: Yes I know I haven’t blogged in a very, very, very long time. Sorry. Here are some thoughts.

I like to read Instapundit and occasionally Glenn Reynolds will even write something for us instead of just posting links (just kidding Glenn). He recently had a post up about the Russian invasion of Georgia that had something to do with dogs and cars. Well even though I have been reading everything I can get my eyes on about this war I happened to miss this post (probably because of the dogs chasing cars bit) and therefore didn’t have the background post to reference before I read Joshua Foust (one of the two minds behind Registan) bitterly complaining about Instapundit linking to Charles Crawford (a retired member of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service aka FCO) and his analysis of the recent transcaucus dust-up.

If you read Registan (and if you care about happenings in Central Asia you should) then you know that Joshua can be a bit testy with anyone that offers analysis and doesn’t know the back roads from Samarkand to Mazar-e-Sharif as well as he does. Just go and read a few of his other posts to get a general idea of what I am talking about. If you can survive the shrapnel from the righteous destruction he rains down on the the ignorant peons that populate the rest of the blogosphere then you might learn something, but I digress.

Here is the meat from Charles Crawford’s blog post entitled Russian Joker:

Foreign Secretary David Miliband spells out the UK position on Georgia:

The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others…

… Russian mind games on withdrawal do them no credit…

… International law must be obeyed. This goes to the heart of the question of how Russia comes to terms with its past, and how it sees its future; above all, whether it recognises that the old frontiers of the Soviet Union are now history, and whether Russia sees its future as part of a rules-based international system.

That sort of analysis rests on certain … psychological assumptions.

These assumptions can be boiled down to the following:

I [Russia] just did what I do best. I took your Kosovo plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this small country with a few tanks and a couple of bullets.

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the Western media that tomorrow a gangbanger in Nagorno-Karabakh will get shot or a truckload of soldiers in Chechnya will get blown up, nobody panics.

But when I say one little country will get a small invasion, everyone loses their minds!

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.

This is followed by a link to an image of Heath Ledger’s Joker. Read the rest of the post for the full impact, but you can get the gist from the above excerpts.

So what is the problem with that analysis? Is neo-tsar Putin merely a nihilistic super-villain that loves to watch the West sputter and panic every time he causes a little (relatively) light mischief on his borders?

No says Joshua in the comments section:

. . .to pretend Russia is an ill-tempered dog in love with its own chaos is simply irrational.

I agree, that is indeed irrational. Vladimir Putin isn’t the Joker neither is his sock-puppet Medvedev, but I can see how a British FCO veteran might look at the chaos of the world today and not see any order or grand plan on the part of Russia.

The Russians know what they are doing and if they did nothing else they showed that the CIA has once again demonstrated in spades that it has no clue what is happening in the Caucus. In theory, you can’t mass that many troops on the border of an American ally in the war on terror, setup the logistics required to transport, feed and supply with ammunition the troops and then not get a friendly warning call from the Secretary of State politely inquiring what in the name of Stalin are you doing. In theory, but our boys at Langley defy all theory with their incompetence don’t they.

If there was one thing this administration was supposed to be, it was recklessly tough when engaging belligerent foreign powers. Oops.