Russian invasion of Georgia: The first war of the post-post-9/11 era?

Opinion

Barry Artiste. Now Public Contributor

Putin accusing Georgia towns hiding Terrorists, it should be known Georgia has a relatively small population of minority Muslims, the Chechnya and Muslim Extremists certainly doesn’t fly.

George Bush, giving Putin both barrels of the invasion of Georgia, certainly show a bit of hypocrisy when one invader trades morality with another invader, in what boils down to both with "Georgia on their Minds"!

(AP Photo Inset)  Georgian Soldiers on patrol in the town of  Gori, Georgia.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/08/11/jonathan-kay-on-the-russian-invasion-of-georgia-the-first-war-of-the-post-post-9-11-era.aspx Jonathan Kay on the Russian invasion of Georgia:

The first war of the post-post-9/11 era?

Posted: August 11, 2008, 3:20 PM

by Jonathan Kay Jonathan Kay

I'm not going to pretend to have any special insights into Russia's invasion of South Ossetia — and now Georgia proper.

Even the Russians may not know how far they'll go, or how long they'll stay: This New York Times report suggests the invasion was a spur-of-the-moment reaction to events in South Ossetia, not a pre-meditated move.

But whatever the outcome, the conflict may mark the beginning of a new era in foreign affairs: The post-post-9/11 world.

Last month, the National Post comment pages presented five excerpts from a new book by Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

Kagan's book is extraordinary — by post-9/11 foreign-policy standards, anyway — in that he devotes a mere five pages to the problem of militant Islam.

That's because he sees militant Islam, and the terrorism it's spawned, as a mere sideshow to a larger conflict between the world's autocracies (led by China and Russia) and the world's democracies, led by the United States and (more flinchingly) the European Union.

In this conflict, religion has little relevance. Instead, it is a raw Great Powers-style struggle for resources, influence and geopolitical control — layered over with an ideological battle about the legitimacy of non-democratic forms of government.

The fight in Georgia is exactly the sort of little proxy war that Kagan, presumably, sees as characteristic of the coming age: A fight between a pro-Western democratic state struggling in the shadow of bald-faced Russian hegemony.

The fight has nothing to do with Islam, or terrorism, or Arabs, or Jews — and is only tangentially related to oil (which flows through the region).

As such, it doesn't fit into any of the patterns we've come to expect since 9/11.

In fact, most Western observers would have difficulty picking a favorite in this war. but not for the fact that Georgia is the more democratic and smaller of the two principals.