Whether the Obama camp first attempts to enact a government-mandated corporate carbon trading scheme or attempts to socialize healthcare, they’re really attempting the largest transfers of wealth since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

It would take all of your bandwidth for me to post right now all the fallacies behind carbon trading schemes disguised as a “cure” for a global warming problem that doesn’t exist. See Fred Singer, see Michael Crichton, see Lawrence Soloman, see John Coleman (Weather Channel founder), see Joe Bastardi (AccuWeather founder), see former president emeritus of the National Academy of Science Fred Seitz, or see the 31,000 scientists who’ve signed a petition stating “human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth.”

Because there is a direct relationship between a nation’s wealth and it’s energy consumption, any attempt to tax via “carbon trading” companies and individuals is nothing more than an attempt to transfer wealth. That’s all it is. Government enforced carbon trading is nothing more than radical totalitarianism. Consider that guys like Sam Adams picked up their musket for a lot less. King George himself would have blushed at the mere suggestion.

As for the health care thing, we’ll we’ve seen this before with Hillary Care. Even the center left has learned (the hard way) that going to a single payer system — that is, socialization of one-seventh of our economy — is a tall order and the third rail of politics right behind Social Security. But even if they don’t pull it off they can still jack costs up, give us MRI and cat scan waiting lines like those in the U.K. or Canada, and create high increases in health care unemployment.

[Wall Street Journal] Already, the Obama campaign is debating which economic policy to push first after a victory: climate change or health care. Though the decision probably won’t be made until at least November, the discussion gives a sense of how Mr. Obama would govern.

Climate change could be the easier choice, his advisers say. There are already a number of bills in Congress that would set up a so-called cap-and-trade system: Emissions blamed for global warming would be capped, and companies would be able to trade permits that allow them to produce emissions up to a set limit. Sen. Obama could put together his own proposals relatively quickly by borrowing measures and language in existing bills.

He would have the government auction off all the permits, raising vast amounts of money — more than $100 billion a year as the program scales up — which he could use for other priorities, such as infrastructure spending. He already plans to commit $15 billion a year to alternative-energy programs to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil. He aims to cut U.S. emissions overall in 2050 by 80% from 1990 levels.

The Obama camp also believes it has a regulatory stick to force congressional action. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. While the Bush administration has taken a go-slow approach, a President Obama would shift into high gear, says Elgie Holstein, a senior Obama energy adviser. If Congress didn’t act on a cap-and-trade system, he says, Mr. Obama “wouldn’t hesitate to use Clean Air Act authorization to regulate” CO2 emissions, a step that could involve a huge increase in EPA oversight of industry.

Some other Obama energy proposals — a “windfall-profits” tax on oil companies and the tapping of the strategic petroleum reserve — may fall by the wayside, Obama aides acknowledge, if the price of oil continues to decline and energy is less of a front-page story.

Still, Sen. Obama faces stiff opposition among many in business. The National Association of Manufacturers opposed a cap-and-trade proposal that failed in the Senate earlier this year and would likely fight an Obama plan as well. The Senate cap-and-trade proposal “ended up being very detrimental to the economy and would put us in a position where we couldn’t compete internationally,” says Jay Timmons, NAM executive vice president.

The other major Obama priority, extending health-care coverage to millions of the uninsured, is even more daunting, conceptually and politically. Sen. Obama would create a new government health-insurance plan and subsidize those who can’t afford it, as well as issue regulations for private plans that wanted to compete with the government plan. He would require larger companies either to provide health insurance or to pay into a fund to help with the cost of covering the uninsured. The program would cost $115 billion a year, Sen. Obama estimates.

This hasn’t been proposed in detail on the federal level, so it could take many months to put together a specific plan, making it less likely to be the first priority. Obama advisers say the concept is similar to one started in Massachusetts under former Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, a possible McCain running mate. In Massachusetts, many more people have signed up than anticipated, and costs are skyrocketing.

Sen. Obama’s health economists say the plan’s price tag would be partly offset by lowering health-care costs by $50 billion annually. Savings would come from computerizing patient records, improving preventive care and allowing drugs to be imported from overseas, among other measures.

Some health-care economists are dubious of the cost savings. Sen. Obama’s aides say they would find the rest of the revenue by reworking President Bush’s tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2010. But that will make the health-care battle even more complicated.

Sen. Obama would raise the top two tax rates to 36% from 33% for married couples with taxable income of more than $165,000, and to 39.6% from 35% for those couples with taxable income of more than $357,000, says Leonard Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. In addition, under Sen. Obama, the tax on capital gains would increase to 20% from 15% for wealthier taxpayers.

Add to that Obama’s payroll tax hike, which will affect the middle class, by raising the ceiling on which they’re taxed. That is, persons or couples filing jointly stop paying payroll taxes at $250,000. That may sound like a lot, but it’s hardly millionaires.

Remember too, this is income, not wealth. Guys like Obama and Biden don’t rely on their income, per se, but rely on their wealth. So they could care less about the taxation of income, and can afford to take the elitist high road of “we should be paying more taxes.”

Those who most suffer from the burden of higher payroll taxes are small business owners — “S” corporations and LLCs — who are really taxed as persons. This will obviously greatly affect their spending and budget decisions (that is, they’ll be laying people off. Period).

RUSTAVI, Georgia, Aug. 23 — Georgian civilians captured and recently freed by Russian and South Ossetian forces on Saturday described beatings, forced labor and miserable living conditions in prison.

…The detainees, many of them elderly fruit farmers from villages along Georgia’s northern border, said male inmates were forced to clean streets and bury the war dead, and occasionally endured beatings that left them with bruises and welts. More than 100 men and women were packed into a cell with a single toilet, they said.

“I thought they would kill us. I was very much afraid,” said Manuna Gogidze, 48.

Gogidze said she and 15 others were forced out of her neighbor’s cellar on Aug. 8 and lined up against a wall. A South Ossetian militiaman was pointing a cocked rifle at them when another fighter intervened, she said. They were then loaded into a truck and taken north.

The inmates’ stories could not be independently verified, though people interviewed separately gave consistent accounts. South Ossetian and Russian officials have in the past denied abusing Georgian detainees. A Kremlin spokesman, who would not give his name, said only that prisoners held by the South Ossetians were treated according to “acceptable standards.” A spokesman for the South Ossetian government could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile people are attacking officials at Guantanamo for “lax” conditions. Yep, we live in Bizarro World.

A few years ago and without merit, people started claiming torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Among the citations was a charge by the International Committee of the Red Cross, who cleverly worded their accusation as “tantamount to torture.” In her book Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trails, former JAG officer Maj. Kyndra Rotunda-Miller explained that to justify this curious definition the Red Cross applied to the U.S. treaties that it has never actually ratified:

The allegation is a strange one because the ICRC never clearly defined what it meant by “tantamount to torture.” The ICRC stopped short of claiming torture, but clearly fabricated their charge for high immediate impact. Beyond the vagueness of the charge, it was inconsistent too. If the ICRC believed that the conditions were deplorable, why did they raise menial issues like speeding up the mail and purchasing checker board games for detainees? Why did the ICRC ask for more skittles candy and softer soccer balls if they really believed detainees were being tortured?

Not only does the ICRC inaccurately interpret Geneva conventions, but it relies on provisions that the US has never approved. For example, the ICRC states as law Protocol 1 — proposed in 1977 but never ratified by the United States, Protocol 1 extends POW protections to persons who do not qualify to be POWs. The United States follows the Third Geneva Convention, which only gives POW protections to people who qualify — legal combatants who wear uniforms and follow the laws of war. Otherwise why would the US military or any other legitimate military bother to follow the laws of war? Why would they not simply adopt less risky terrorist tactics? The ICRC argues that 150 countries have ratified Protocol 1. Curiously, however, countries experienced with terrorism [Israel, the U.K.] have either refused to ratify the protocol or have done so with several caveats.

In other words the charge is baloney. Maj. Rotunda-Miller adds that other critics mistakenly identify waterboarding, but she retorts that the waterboarding was conducted by the CIA, not the military, on three high-ranking members of al Qaeda (Khalid Mohammed, the 9-11 mastermind, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim Nashiri), and not at Guantanamo (which thus destroys the argument that torture occurs at Guantanamo.

That’s some history, and perhaps a little too deep. But I wanted to set that up before highlighting this Washington Post article.

The Guantanamo critics are back, but this time they’re charging that Guantanamo officials are too lenient! Security conditions are so lax at Guantanamo (and a far, far cry from the accusatory harsh conditions the antiwar left) that detainees were able to commit suicide with relative ease.

[Wash. Post] Contained in more than 3,000 pages of military investigative documents, medical records, autopsies, and statements from guards and detainees is a rare view inside the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and one of the worst episodes of its six-year history. The documents from the NCIS investigation, which will be released under the Freedom of Information Act, were obtained yesterday by The Washington Post.

They make clear that that [Ali Abdullah Ahmed Naser al-Sullami] Sullami, along with Saudis Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, 22, and Mana Shaman Allabard al-Tabi, 32, carefully planned their suicides so that they would be able to prepare and carry them out without their guards taking notice. Investigators and military officials believe, according to the documents, that other detainees were aware that the suicides were about to happen and at one point chanted a song called “Kill Them All” — used by al-Qaeda and the Taliban after killing Americans — possibly to mask the sounds of death on the cellblock.

Investigators found that guards had become lax on certain rules because commanders wanted to reward the more compliant detainees, giving them extra T-shirts, blankets and towels. Detainees were allowed to hang such items to dry, or to provide privacy while using the toilet, but were not supposed to be able to obscure their cells while sleeping.

Guards told officials that it was not unusual to see blankets hanging in the cells and that they did not think twice when they passed several cells on the night of June 9, 2006, with blankets strung through the wire mesh. Authorities believe the men probably hanged themselves around 10 p.m., but they were not discovered until shortly after midnight on June 10.

Amazing. The critics can’t make up their mind. “They’re torturing… no wait, they’re too easy!”

This politically correct atmosphere is just what former JAG Maj. Kyndra Rotunda-Miller talked about.

[Maj. Rotunda-Miller] Detainees at Guantánamo Bay will sometimes throw urine, or spit upon, the military prison guards.

The reason that detainees continue behaving badly is because the Army does not have a disciplinary system to hold them accountable for crimes they commit while detained. There is no disciplinary system in Guantánamo, except for prison guards guarding the detainees.

However under the Third Geneva Convention (article 39, chapter 6) an entire chapter is devoted to camp discipline. “The prime purpose of measures of discipline is to ensure that the prisoner of war remains in the hands of the detaining power, so that he can neither do harm to that power within the camp, nor by escaping being able to take up arms again. It must not be forgotten that his life has been spared only on the condition that he is no longer in danger to the enemy.” Under the Geneva conventions, detainees are even required to salute the detaining Powers. But this never happens at Guantánamo Bay.

Detainees who break the rules under the Geneva conventions are subject to discipline the US has a right to bring detainees to trial and sentenced them for crimes committed against US prison guards at Guantánamo Bay. Under the Geneva conventions, the US could apply different disciplinary sanctions including fines, a limitation of privileges, duties that cause fatigue, and confinement. But this never happens at Guantánamo Bay.

Some detainees monitor guards and doctors, and make weapons. Detainees are resourceful. They have used [for weapons] springs from the faucets, broken light bulbs, and used fan blades as weapons. The incidents [had] risen to eight per day. In one year, detainees stacked victims with homemade knives 90 times, including cutting the doctor administering aid. Now, doctors wear body armor when you treat detainees. Detainees have faked suicide and attack the prison guards in Guantánamo Bay [who came into the cell to investigate]. In 2006, one detainee used sheets attached to the ceiling. A guard thought the detainee was attempting to commit suicide and called for assistance. When prison guards entered the cell, and countered a slick floor from feces, urine and soapy water that calls them to fall. The detainees then attacked the guards.

Once the commander of Guantánamo Bay, Admiral Harry Harris, found prescription pills in the binding of a Koran. The guards did not find this because the military for bids them from touching detainees Koran’s.

It’s likely that the incidents above could be contained in the report that the Washington Post published today, but it’s obvious in failing to mention the attacks, among other things, that the media bears much of the responsibility for the lax atmosphere at Guantanamo.

If there’s torture going on at Guantanamo, it’s the detainees torturing our military guards.

Absolutely frightening…

“Over his thirty-five years in Washington, Senator Biden has been a reflexive liberal on every single economic issue,” said Club for Growth President Pat Toomey. “Whether the issue is taxes, spending, regulation, or school choice, Senator Biden has voted consistently for more taxes, more spending, more government, and less freedom and choice. Taxpayers can expect more of the same from the Obama-Biden ticket—more government, less prosperity.”

Joe Biden on Taxes:

• Voted for President Clinton’s tax hike (RC #247, 1993)
• Voted against repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax (RC #261, 1999)
• Voted against eliminating the marriage penalty (RC #79, 2001)
• Voted against the 2001 tax cuts (RC# 170, 2001)
• Voted against repealing the Death Tax (RC #151, 2002) (RC #109, 2007)
• Voted against a repeal of the 1993 tax increase on Social Security benefits (RC #94, 2003)
• Voted against the 2003 Bush tax cuts (RC #196, 2003)
• Voted for a 50% windfall profits tax on oil profits (RC #331, 2005)
• Voted against extending the 2001 tax cuts (RC #118, 2006) (RC #107, 2007)

Joe Biden on Spending:

• Voted for the Farm Bill in 2002 and 2008 (RC #103, 2002) (RC #130, 2008)
• Voted in favor of the Bridge to Nowhere (RC #262, 2005)
• Voted against capping spending (RC #286, 2005)
• Voted to kill a resolution stating a moral obligation to offset new spending with spending cuts (RC #140, 2007)
• Voted for the expanded SCHIP bill (RC #307, 2007)
• Voted against an earmark moratorium (RC #75, 2008)
• Voted to override President Bush’s veto of the Farm Bill (RC #140, 2008)
• Was declared Porker of the Month by Citizens Against Government Waste in January 2002

Joe Biden on Trade:

• Voted to impose steel tariffs (RC #178, 1999)
• Voted against Trade Promotion Authority (RC #207, 2002)
• Voted against free trade with Singapore (RC #318, 2003)
• Voted against free trade with Chile (RC #319, 2003)
• Voted against CAFTA (RC #209, 2005)
• Voted against free trade with Oman (RC #250, 2006)

Joe Biden on Regulation:

• Voted for the burdensome Sarbanes-Oxley legislation (RC #192, 2002)
• Voted against exempting small businesses from Sarbanes-Oxley (RC #139, 2007)
• Voted for a minimum wage hike (RC #257, 2005)
• Voted for the “card check” bill—stripping workers of their right to a secret ballot when voting to form a union (RC #227, 2007)
• Voted to kill the Davis Bacon waiver (RC #334, 2007)

Joe Biden on School Choice:

• Voted against a vouchers program for DC schools (RC #260, 1997)
• Voted against school choice for low-income earners (RC #179, 2001)

Joe Biden on Tort Reform:

• Voted against limiting lawyer fees on tobacco settlements (RC #161, 2003)
• Voted against class action tort reform (RC #9, 2005)

Joe Biden on Political Free Speech:

• Voted for McCain-Feingold (RC #64, 2001)

Joe Biden on Entitlement Reform:

• Voted against preventing the plundering of Social Security (RC #313, 1999)
• Voted to expand government-run healthcare (RC #307, 2007)

This is by Amir Taheri:

[Vice Presidential candidate Joe] Biden has the experience of more than three decades in the US senate, at least two of them dealing with foreign affairs and defense. But experience is no guarantee of good judgment. And Biden has been wrong on almost every key issue.

* In 1979, he shared Carter’s starry-eyed belief that the fall of the shah in Iran and the advent of the ayatollahs represented progress for human rights. Throughout the hostage crisis, as US diplomats were daily paraded blindfolded in front of television cameras and threatened with execution, he opposed strong action against the terrorist mullahs and preached dialogue.

* Throughout the 1980s. Biden opposed President Ronald Reagan’s proactive policy against the Soviet Union. Biden was all for détente – which, in practice, meant Western subsidies that would have enabled the moribund USSR to cling to life and continue doing mischief.

* In 1990, Biden found it difficult to support President George Bush’s decision to use force to kick Saddam Hussein’s army of occupation out of Kuwait.

* A decade-plus later, the senator did vote for the liberation of Iraq from Saddamite tyranny. But as soon as terrorists started challenging the new democratic system in Iraq, he switched sides and became a critic of the whole war effort. He claimed that the Iraq war was lost and suggested that the US partition the newly liberated country into three or more mini-states.

Biden’s misreading of the situation in Iraq shows that experience is no substitute for judgment. He judged the situation on the basis of headlines and CNN footage – not the long-term, geo-strategic interests of the United States. In short, he lacked what President Harry Truman called “strategic patience.”

* For more than a decade, Biden has adopted an ambivalent attitude towards the Islamic Republic in Tehran, now emerging as the chief challenger to US interests in the Middle East. Biden’s links with pro-Tehran lobbies in the US and his support for “unconditional dialogue” with the mullahs echo Obama’s own wrong-headed promise to circumvent the current multilateral efforts by seeking direct US-Iran talks, excluding the Europeans as well as Russia and China.

Had Biden had his way, “the Evil Empire” would still be around and Saddam Hussein still in power. The US would still be begging the mullahs of Tehran for forgiveness of unspecified “past sins” – and more American hostages would be seized in the Middle East while the mullahs celebrate their first atomic bombs.

By choosing Biden, Obama, the candidate of hope, has transformed his promise of change, into a back-to-the-future pirouette – back to Jimmy Carter.

Did you know that Barack Obama has a 26-year-old half brother who “lives on less than a dollar a month in the outer slums of Nairobi, Kenya?” Obama has met him only twice, and failed to mention him in his latest autobiography.

Andrew Breitbart calls out Obama on his “glass houses” mentality.

Someone who made $4.2 million last year and lives in a mansion that a mobster helped pay for should not be throwing stones. When Mr. Obama’s flesh-and-blood lives in squalor, raising the standard of living of his opponent’s extended family is probably not a smart idea.

It’s scary to think that this could be a preview of an Obama presidency in which attacking the rich is all the rage, and the rich in the news media pretend it’s OK. Hugo Chavez is having a helluva run bringing down his formerly prosperous nation of Venezuela with that formula.

…Does anyone think if Mr. McCain had a sibling living in a trailer park making minimum wage (892 times more than Mr. Obama’s half brother’s yearly income) that the mainstream media and the Obama campaign wouldn’t notice?

In fact, last week National Public Radio ran a piece titled, “Cindy McCain’s Half Sister ‘Angry’ She’s Hidden,” highlighting that Mr. McCain’s wife’s half sister was left out of her father’s will. The piece was duly filed under the publicly funded network’s “conservative compassion deficit” media template.

Yet Mr. Obama has a half brother who lives in Africa on three cents a day, and the story breaks in an Italian magazine and is picked up by a London newspaper and a few others in Australia.

Amen. Read the rest. They hypocrisy of the wealthy liberal — to whit, now that I’ve made mine I’m going to jack up your taxes — never ceases to amaze me.

By the way, McCain did screw up on the house thing. All he had to say was “I own one house with my wife, and her family owns several investment properties.”

[ABC News] The latest threat came after a top Russian general said Poland would risk a military strike if it allowed the base and as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed Russia’s saber rattling, saying the threats “border on the bizarre.”

“When you threaten Poland, you perhaps forget that it is not 1988,” Rice said, according to The Associated Press. “It’s 2008 and the United States has a … firm treaty guarantee to defend Poland’s territory as if it was the territory of the United States. So it’s probably not wise to throw these threats around.”

Condi’s defense of Poland is both an important line in the sand and message of solidarity to other Eastern European allies. But it also seems to validate the quote of appeasement by Richard Holbrooke posted earlier today.

The U.S. seems to be saying, “You can have Georgia, but don’t go after Poland.” I recall similar messages regarding Czechoslovakia in 1938…

[WSJ] Georgian authorities, meanwhile, said Russian forces are building what appears to be a permanent checkpoint outside the strategically important Black Sea port of Poti.

Georgian Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia called Russia’s buffer-zone plans a “totally illegal and illegitimate move” that would violate a French-sponsored peace plan Russia and Georgia signed last week.

“What they are striving to do is by military means to achieve a political goal — to paralyze and asphyxiate the country,” he said. “This is not a military or peacekeeping move, it’s about destroying the sovereignty of a neighboring country.”

This isn’t peacekeeping, it’s just what the Georgian defense minister said: strangulation of their economy and government.

Conversely, when U.S. troops were in the Balkans or Iraq or Afghanistan, they don’t splatter posters of the American president all over town, as the Russians are putting up Putin posters throughout Georgia. It is 1968 all over again.

[WSJ] Georgian officials say they were surprised by the strength of [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s show of solidarity last Sunday when she visited Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital.

She promised that Georgia would one day join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, despite Russian opposition, and proposed NATO help rebuild Georgia’s military and infrastructure. NATO foreign ministers agreed on an aid package at a meeting Tuesday in Brussels.

The German leader didn’t get on well with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in previous encounters, partly because Mr. Saakashvili lectured her on economics, according to people familiar with those meetings. And Ms. Merkel was instrumental in blocking Georgia’s U.S.-backed bid to start NATO membership talks at the alliance’s April summit in Bucharest. She said a country with unresolved territorial disputes wasn’t ready to join NATO.

German officials at the time said she also wanted to give Russia’s incoming president, Dmitry Medvedev, room to deliver on promises of liberal changes. At a terse meeting Friday in Sochi, Russia, Ms. Merkel told Mr. Medvedev that Russia’s image in Europe was worsening every day Russian tanks remained in Georgia, according to German officials.

Germany’s business lobby opposes political moves that could offend Moscow. The German economy relies heavily on exports, which make up 47% of gross domestic product, and Russia is one of Germany’s fastest-growing markets. Germany also gets 37% of its natural gas and 31% of its crude oil from Russia.

Ms. Merkel is the first German leader to grow up in Communist East Germany, an experience that left her instinctively suspicious of Russian power, unlike many politicians from Germany’s capitalist West who have long tried to act as a diplomatic bridge between Washington and Moscow.

The following excerpts are from Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French reporter and author of “Who Killed Daniel Pearl.” You should know, if you don’t know Levy, he’s you’re typical liberal Frenchman. That is to say, critical of American foreign policy until the stuff hits the fan — in this case Putin’s Russia acting as Khrushchev’s. So, his reporting from Georgia isn’t coming from the villified “neo-con” view. Quite the opposite.

In any event, he’s a solid professional, and what he had to say on his visit to Georgia is well worthy of attention.

Then, forty kilometers outside the city, around Okami, we see a battalion, as usual Russian, attached to a unit of armored vehicles whose role is to stop journalists from going one direction and refugees from going the other.

One of them, a peasant, wounded in the forehead, still dazed and terrified, tells me the story of fleeing his village in Ossetia on foot, three days ago. The Russians arrived, and in their wake, Cossack and Ossetian gangs pillaged, raped and murdered. As they did in Chechnya, they rounded up the young men and drove them away in trucks, to unknown destinations. Fathers were killed in front of their sons. Sons were killed in front of their fathers. In the basement of a house which they blew up with propane cylinders they had collected, they came upon a family and stripped them of everything they had tried to hide and then forced the adults to kneel down and executed them with a single shot to the head. The Russian officer in charge at the check point listens to the story. But he doesn’t care. In any case he looks like he has been drinking too much and he just doesn’t care. For him, the war is over. No scrap of paper, a ceasefire, a five or six-point agreement- will change his victory. And this pathetic refugee can say whatever he wants.

…After crossing through six new check points, one of which consists of a tree trunk hoisted up and down by a winch commanded by a group of paramilitaries, we arrive in Gori. We are not in the center of the city. But from where Lomaia has dropped us, before taking off in the Audi to collect his wounded, from this intersection dominated by an enormous tank as big as a rolling bunker, we can see fires burning everywhere. Rockets lighting up the sky at regular intervals, followed by short detonations. The emptiness.

The slight odor of putrefaction and death. Most of all, the incessant rumbling of armored vehicles. Almost every other car is an unmarked car jammed with militia, recognizable because of their white armbands and their headbands. Gori does not belong to the Ossetia which the Russians claim they have come to “liberate.” It is a Georgian town. And they have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town. Emptied.

“It’s logical,” explains General Vyachislav Borisov, as we stand in the stench and the night waiting for Lomaia to return. “We are here because the Georgians are incompetent, because their administration collapsed and the town was being looted. Look at this,” showing me on his cell phone photographs of weapons of Israeli origin, which he emphasizes heavily, “Do you think we could leave all this lying around without supervision? And let me tell you,” he struts around, striking a match to light a cigarette, startling the little blond tank gunner who had fallen asleep in his turret, “We summoned the Israeli Foreign Minister to Moscow.

And he was told that if he continues to supply arms to the Georgians we would continue to supply Hezbollah and Hamas.” We would continue? What an admission!

…The last word will belong to the American Richard Holbrooke, a ranking diplomat close to Barack Obama whom I meet in the bar of our hotel at the tail end of the night: “There is floating in this affair a bad smell of appeasement.” He is right. Either we are capable of raising our voice and saying STOP to Putin in Georgia. Or the man who went, in his own words, “down into the toilets” to kill the civilians in Chechnya will feel he has the right to do the same thing to any one of his neighbors.

Is this how we will build Europe, peace and the world of tomorrow?