A Frontline Account

Michael Totten gives some great front line reporting on the Georgia-Russian war.

Some crazy stuff in here about how Russia gamed the international system to their advantage. Also, the power of a few words...

They lived in a failed state, then there was the Rose Revolution – it wasn't perfect but, damn, now there's electricity, there's jobs, roads have been fixed – and what the Georgians have had drummed into them is that Georgia is now a constitutional state, a state of law and order. And everybody here knows that Ossetia is a gangster's smuggler's paradise. The whole world knows it, but here they know it particularly well. The peacekeepers had a military objective, and the first rule of warfare when you're talking to the media is not to reveal to your enemy what you're going to do. So they weren't going to blather into a microphone and say well, actually, I'm trying to go through Tskhinvali in order to stop the Russians. So what did he say instead? I'm here to restore constitutional order in South Ossetia. And that's it. With that, Georgia lost the propaganda war and the world believes Saakashvili started it. And the rest of the story...you know.”

In Hollywood, you write some bad lines and we don't get a writing assignment or get edited. In politics, you say the wrong thing at the wrong time and history is altered in your disfavor.