More on the Russia-Georgia conflict

First, Gareth Porter makes a provocative case that it was the Bush administration's strong push to make Georgia and the Ukraine members of NATO - seen by Russia as a strategy for containing Russia right up to its "ethnically sensitive" border with Georgia. border.

He notes that:

There were plenty of signals that Russia would not acquiesce in the alignment of a militarily aggressive Georgia with a U.S.-dominated military alliance. Then-Russian President Vladimir Putin made no secret of his view that this represented a move by the United States to infringe on Russia's security in the South Caucasus region. In February 2007, he asked rhetorically, "Against whom is this expansion intended?"

Contrary to the portrayal of Russian policy as aimed at absorbing South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Russia and regime change in Georgia, Moscow had signaled right up to the eve of the NATO summit its readiness to reach a compromise along the lines of Taiwan's status in U.S.-China relations: formal recognition of the sovereignty over the secessionist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in return for freedom to develop extensive economic and political relations. But it was conditioned on Georgia staying out of NATO.

And second, check out this post from Wired's "danger blog". David Axe links to a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review that criticizes the blogging world's handling of the initial Russia-Georgia conflict. I would largely have to agree: in the last few days I have been scouring the web doing background research on the topic and haven't seen a lot of informed or outside-the-box analysis from my favorite blogs.