Rekiwi's Blog

So the Russians are busy defending their citizens in a neighboring country.

Also, as secondary considerations, they don't want Georgia to join NATO or to provide a bypass for oil to the West.

Really, who can blame the Russians for poking around in their neighbor's yard (which used to be their own back yard before all these new fences were put up)? Energy is a huge trump card for Russia's game with the West. Why should anyone expect them to just give it away?

And missile defenses in Poland? Does anyone really expect Russia to just roll over like a sleepy ol' hound dog as the West chips away at their leverage on the world?

Their justifications for invading are more gossamer than a Victoria's Secret fashion-show wardrobe and threatening Poland with nuclear attack is a tad heavy handed, but what else did anyone expect from the paranoid, corrupt, insecure, zero-sum Russians?

All of these big, global issues deserve answers more potent than NATO's limp-wristed, peevish "business as usual" complaint, but that's not what got my attention.

I watched a BBC report from Georgia yesterday. A German husband and Georgian wife were on the road out of Gori. With their young daughter and son in the car, they were doing their best to get their family the hell out of town. Men in civilian clothes shot at them as they passed. Everyone in the car was injured. Everyone survived.

The dad relates how he drove like mad on flat tires, then bare rims, to get away.

The mother, full of bullet fragments on a grimy hospital bed, cries as she talks haltingly about shielding her children with her body.

The daughter, about four years old, explains how her teddy bear was soaked with her mom's blood.

The son, probably less than a year old with a big bandage taped to the side of his head, smiles in wonder at the BBC's camera and lights.

Soldiers, martyrs, Olympians, families: We're all just a currency to be spent, a raw material to be crushed in the friction between nations as they posture and wrangle.