This piece makes some sense. A snippet:
What can the West do? The first step is for the U.S. and its allies to rush military and medical supplies to Tbilisi. If we want democracy to survive there, Georgians have to believe that we have their backs. At the moment, the tepidness of the Western response has given them serious cause for doubt. In addition, Washington should lead the effort to devise a list of economic and diplomatic sanctions toward Russia that impose real costs for what Moscow has done. Russia should know that the West has a greater capacity to sustain a new Cold War than Russia, with its petroleum-dependent economy, does.
Next, the West should make use of Russia’s claim that its role in South Ossetia and Abkhazia is driven by the need to protect the populations there. If so, Moscow should have no objections to U.N.-sanctioned peacekeepers and observers moving into those two regions to replace the jerry-rigged system of "peacekeepers" that, until the war broke out, consisted of Russian troops, local separatist militaries and Georgian forces. If nothing else, the goal should be to put Mr. Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president, on their back foot diplomatically.
Read the whole thing.
Here is something from Jaime Sneider's note at the Weekly Standard Blog which says what is going on here from the US gov't prospective. Here is what he wrote:
Yes, Minister captured quite eloquently how these so-called experts respond to emergencies.
Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. In Stage One we say that nothing is going to happen. Stage Two, we say something may be going to happen but we should do nothing about it. Stage Three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do. Stage Four, we say maybe there is something we could have done, but it's too late now.
By my estimate, we are currently in Stage Three ("'We have no good options,' a US National Security Council official told The Daily Telegraph"), and about to enter Stage Four.
The issue here is that our government needs a clean sweep and remodeling of our executive branch to return it to the vision of effective and responsive executive agency the Framers envisioned. Something Newt said nearly a year ago about the horrid state of our executive branch only was hit home to me by the way the State dept and CIA actively worked against the policy of the administration after the policy was made with their apparent blessing.. or their silent consent.
The executive branch is broken and if we want to face the 21st century safe and govern effective we need to jettison the 19th century system of governmental agency and civil service and enter the 21st. After reading Doug Feith's book, I am more and more convinced that the executive is in major need of repair. And a repair to undo the anti-constitutional instrumnets and logic the Progressives introduced into the operations of our executive branch over the course of the 20th century.