U.S. Debates Putin’s Ambitions

[laststeamtrain]

U.S. Debates Putin’s Ambitions

Analysis by Daniel Luban

WASHINGTON, Aug 14 (IPS) - Just days after the outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia, the debate in Washington over how to view the crisis historically has become nearly as contentious as the debate over how to respond politically.

Prominent neoconservatives and other foreign policy hawks have portrayed Russia’s offensive into Georgia as an echo of 1930s Nazi expansionism -- an interpretation that has been hotly contested by a number of liberals and conservative realists.

But the question of what sort of concrete action the U.S. should take in the Caucasus has proved far messier, as both camps remain split about the proper response to the Russian offensive.

Since Friday, when Russia sent troops into the restive Georgian region of South Ossetia, neoconservatives in the U.S. have analogised Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, and the Russian incursion to Germany’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland.

"The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important," began a Monday column in the Washington Post by prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century. "Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia?"

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At a panel held Wednesday at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, Munich analogies were plentiful.

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43562

[The Magistrate]

1. Kagan, Sir, Is A Pile Of Excrement

No one who cannot cite the details of the Sudeten affair without consulting references has any business citing it in discussing present day policy.