John Bolton is on fire in the Telegraph. Not least because he uses some of the historical allusions the Volgi has pulled out.

The West, collectively, failed in this crisis.

And he takes the Bushies to the woodshed. Great stuff.

Andrei Illarionov draws some early conclusions over at RFE/RL. Especially sharp his his pointing out the similarity of the Russian justification for entering Georgia to their declared casus belli in the Second Chechen War.

The war was a spectacular provocation that had been long prepared and successfully executed by the Russian “siloviki” — those in government with connections to the military and security organs — that almost entirely repeats in another theater at another time the “incursion of Basayev into Daghestan” and the beginning of the second Chechnya war in 1999.

Andrew McCarthy pounds the Administration like veal over their Russia policy and draws some connections to Iran policy as well:

More telling, though, is the step the president hasn’t taken: a necessary step, but one tantamount to a concession that the administration’s Iran policy has been a farce.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.