What's your point? The comparison of circumstances aren't even close. And if you're somehow insinuating that I'm for the current occupation of Iraq, I suggest you invest in some reading glasses.

Don't even bother with Fanta. It's all and with him, even in the event of a credible source. The U.S. military wins in a conflict with Russia hands down; there is no debating this. Our military was built from the ground up to fight Russia, and it is nowhere near its strength it was 20+ years ago. It is still a force to be reckoned with, yes, but it is far away from being something we could not handle. A really nice Nuclear submarine and fancy cruise missiles are nice, but they're nothing compared to the new Navy rail guns and path finding technology we've invested in for our vehicles.

Irrelevant. We're talking about the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation here, not the legitimacy of an impotent organization such as NATO.

Yet you have suggested that the purported actions of Russia are somehow not worthy of American response?



This sentence is redundant. War is a form of diplomacy, as diplomacy is best categorized as a continuum where war exists at one end with negotiation on another.



This is true, I'm sorry that you cannot accept a strategic fact accepted by even the best of our military analysts. Again, I apologize.

The United States could easily take Russia in a military conflict, but given the blatant disregard of military facts in this forum, don't expect that to be the consensus here.

Even if that's so, then what is the point of thread? According to you now, this topic has much more to do with the imperfections of Bush and his administration rather than the moral failure that is John Edwards. So what was the point?

It's not that it's not relevant--it is. It's just not as important in perspective. This is a country that engages in the following:

- Massive suppression of political ideas and free speech via technology and police forces.
- Mass removal of people (and seizure of land) by force to build dams, public projects, and in astounding irony, facilities for the Olympic games.
- Daily execution of political prisoners for the use of organ replacement.
- Unwarranted military action against entire ethnic groups and regions (Tibet, and to a lesser extent, the Mongolian/Muslim populations of the northwest).

And I won't even get into their subversion activities in foreign countries (namely, the US).

Your Pravda spin is so absurd, it does not warrant response from anyone on this board.

China's pollution output is the last thing any sane person should be worried about when it comes to that country.

So you're saying you're not referencing Bush in the first post?

No, we don't. You have excused Russia's response as rational, while I have fairly dismissed it as genocide.

So you are suggesting it was a coincidence you titled this thread "The Sins John Edwards Did Not Commit" and then simultaneously mentioned the sins of another, presumably the sitting president? Grow up.

You do not justify bad behavior by referring worse behavior.

The expansion of NATO is what caused this conflict. If we truly had an element of goodwill in our foreign policy, we should have disbanded NATO after 1991 and never started building that missile shield over Poland.

Could someone enlighten me as to the substantive points in this thread?

Proof that you can't read, else it would have been blatantly obvious to any one with half a brain from my past posts that I am the equivalent of Neocon-kryptonite.

We're not talking about who votes for who. We're talking about ideologies as they relate to social and cultural trends, and my earlier statement it shown to factually true via statistics. This is not speculation; it is supported through quantitative research. Read "The Interest Group Society" by Jeffery M. Berry and Clyde Wilcox.

Then again, your posts on this board reek of ignorance, so you should probably just blame this whole thing on Bush and get it over with.

Zapchaser is right; the irony of Fanta is that he supports Obama, who's foreign policy is virtually no different than the current disaster.

Now back to Georgia;

Maybe it would be better to leave Georgia to the wolves. My first instinct is to at least route for the Georgians, because they are only preserving their territorial integrity--southern Ossetia is not part of Russia. What's going on here is tantamount to the Kosovo debacle, only this time, Russia is on the wrong side.

I thought it was pretty much generally accepted that the Cold War never ended?

Uh, what? That has nothing to do with what I previously stated.