Surprise – influential neocons seldom fail to push for military action against somebody, somewhere:
Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.
Well, I’m just shocked that Kristol the Younger favors military action. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that he fails to see the pattern I noted in my column today, entitled “Georgia and the Democracy Debacle, despite the obvious historical antecedent.
It’s striking that dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes — whatever their differences — seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies. So Russia helps Iran. Iran and North Korea help Syria. Russia and China block Security Council sanctions against Zimbabwe. China props up the regimes in Burma and North Korea.
It’s not striking at all, it’s completely obvious and in complete accordance with the historical behavior shown by Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. Perhaps as importantly, the Peloponnesians were the side favored by neutrals… and based on the size of that Georgian contingency, today’s nominally democratic “allies” are far less useful to America than they were to Athens in its unsuccessful attempt to maintain its maritime domination of Greece 2,500 years ago.