As to NATO for Georgia, in my mind, the jury is still out. I see good arguments for and good arguments against…but for practical purposes, Putin has pretty much killed that idea, because of the ‘conditions on the ground’ – i.e., Russia is now so entrenched that we’d have a damn hard time fulfilling our treaty obligations if we had to…

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Let us stipulate that Putin is a “bad guy.”

Is he bad like Stalin or Hitler? No. Osama bin Laden? No.

But he is

1) an authoritarian
2) determined to maximize Russia’s power and influence in the world

Note that these two are not necessarily correlated. I could perfectly well imagine a Russian leader with Putin’s troublesome foreign policy, but who didn’t go around having newspaper reporters killed, and political opponents jailed on trumped-up corruption charges. You’d call such a person a “populist demagogue” and he’d still be a “bad guy” in your book, but he’d be a different sort of bad guy.

So, by itself, the “bad guy” designation doesn’t tell you much — or at least not much that is helpful — about how to deal with them. Instead, dividing the world into good guys and bad guys, and building a foreign policy around that division, just leads to an unending series of bad decisions.

John McCain’s longstanding proposal to throw Russia out of the G8 is a case in point. So is his current proposal to fast-track Georgia’s membership in NATO. Or his Iran policy, or … I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Furthermore, you’re attacking strawmen in claiming that there is anyone who is claiming that America’s sh..er, poop, doesn’t stink. What does that have to do with anything? Ryan recently gave us a view of the world without good guys and bad guys, where the massive bloodshed of the 20th century is blamed on U.S./Soviet tension in the Cold War(!) without any acknowledgment of WWI, WWII, the Great Famine and Great Terror of Stalin, or the Cultural Revolution of Mao. This is what an analysis of history looks like when you remove the idea that there are bad guys – with the possible exception of the United States.

No, as I’ve said elsewhere, we have plenty of stains in our past and present – but there ARE bad guys out there, and you don’t have to whitewash America to believe that. If there has been an oversimplification on one side of this conflict, painting Georgia as the hero and Russia as the villain, you oversimplify on the other hand by ignoring the fact that Putin is indisputably up to no good in order to get in a cheap shot at neocons (I still can’t for the life of me see one possible reason to bring neocons into this conversation)…

I will fully support your corrected version of “democracies, too, can act recklessly and aggressively.”

I really think this point needs to be driven home.

There are some people (I would call them ‘neocons’, except that Mark tells us that term is obsolete), who operate under the presumption that, just because some country is a democracy, it follows that their shit doesn’t stink.

This leads to some really bad policy prescriptions, as we have seen in the pronouncements from some quarters on this Georgia-Russia conflict (I’ll remind you that, according to John McCain, the answer is to fast-track Georgia’s admission into NATO), but in other instances as well, over the past seven years.

The world is too complicated and, frankly, too dangerous a place for such simple-minded ‘good-guys vs. bad guys’ analyses. One might hope that this conflict would serve as something of an object lesson, but I’m afraid that the neocons (or whatever it is that they are called these days) have precious little ability to learn from their mistakes.

It is, indeed, primarily Stalin, Mao, and Hitler who were responsible for the vast, vast loss of life in the 20th century do to idiotic things like war and ideology. The worst you can lay at the feat of the United States, even under the most left-wing interpretation, is the bomb (yes, massive civilian casualties), the firebombing of Tokyo and some German cities, and Vietnam. Now, I don’t want to suggest that this loss of life that can conceivably be laid at the feet of the U.S. (and I would argue strenuously against the first two and perhaps even the third being put on the U.S. ledger) is small or inconsequential – but it pales next to the literally tens of millions who lost their lives at the hands of the Big 3 tyrants. No one can convince me otherwise for the plain reason that the facts are indisputably on my side on this one, and I’ll provide figures if you need convincing. I’ll agree with you that it is unfair to put the American left or European left in the same boat as Stalin and Mao, nor should the right be in the same boat as Hitler and Mussolini. All of the above are extremist examples of both tendencies, and though many Americans supported Russia for far too long under Stalin, almost all eventually came around to seeing what a monster he was.

I’ll thank you to not question my ability to argue seriously when you come around throwing accusations about how any supporter of the Iraq War has ‘zero moral authority’. When you start an argument belligerently, you can’t expect a calm discussion. I’m ready to debate anything in civilized terms, and you can go a long way towards helping that by respecting your opponents.

You are one of the few people I know who still talks about ‘neocons’ (you should read the new Fareed Zakaria piece, where he notes that the former influence on Bush’s foreign policy commonly placed under the neocon rubric has been completely eclipsed, by the way), so, since you feel I am a neocon, but I’ve never considered myself one, I’ll tell you that (a) I do support Israel’s right to exist, meaning I oppose Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and others who do not do so, and (b) I do tend to be a hawk. So if that makes me a neocon, guilty as charged, but I would say it makes me smart. You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to…

So, do I think the United States is some pristine, omniscient, God-like presence on the world stage? No, I do not…we are a nation with many stains on our past and present…but I also believe our country has been responsible for far more good in the world than evil. I also believe that the vast majority of our leaders, right and left, have been men of good will. I cannot say the same about Vladimir Putin, and I seriously doubt you can, either…

Let’s get one more thing clear – Godwin’s Law is being vastly abused by you to shut down honest debate. Godwin’s Law was a humorous attempt to show how flame wars on the Usenet quickly escalated into ridiculous shouting matches. The fact that I comment that Russia’s recent behavior is very reminiscent of Germany’s in 1937, as many, many people, including high European diplomats, noted publicly, is not a suitable invocation of Godwin’s Law. Nor does the fact that I made the comment on the Internet enter into it. If I called YOU Hitler-like, that would be one thing…but to call Putin Hitler-like is merely to confirm that I possess the power of observation…

I will fully support your corrected version of “democracies, too, can act recklessly and aggressively.” In fact, recent allegations seem to offer some confirmation for the idea that the Bush administration warned Saakashvili against this particular course of action. “Reckless” is a particularly apt word.