I’m somewhat encouraged to see an element of realism in the foreign policy Establishment regarding the situation in Georgia. It appears that people understand that we don’t have any good cards in our hand. In fact, we’ve overplayed our hand and had our bluff called. In such a situation, as painful as it may be, the only correct thing to do is to fold. If we don’t fold…if we double down on our bluff, the result might look like this:

Putin criticized the United States for viewing Georgia as the victim instead of the aggressor, and for airlifting Georgian troops back home from Iraq on Sunday.

“Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages,” Putin said in Moscow. “And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilian alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection.”

That is a naked threat to invade all of Georgia, hunt down President Mikhail Saakashvili and his top cronies, and to hang them until dead. If you want to talk about throwing down the gauntlet…it has been thrown.

Putin, shown on state television speaking to officials, said the West had manipulated the truth about the war to present the Georgians as the victims rather than the aggressors.

Washington was hampering Moscow’s efforts to find a way out of the conflict, he said.

“It is a shame that some of our partners are not helping us but, essentially, are hindering us,” Putin said.

“The very scale of this cynicism is astonishing — the attempt to turn white into black, black into white and to adeptly portray victims of aggression as aggressors and place the responsibility for the consequences of the aggression on the victims.”

American Democrats are very familiar with the ‘black is white’ gambit that our foreign policy Establishment has been running on people. Although, contra Putin, I don’t see any white in this scenario at all. What I see is bunch of people that are very cavalier with other people’s lives. It’s the same old story we’ve seen repeated since at least World War One. Misguided feelings of pride, stubborn insistence on the importance of prestige, and the battle for control of natural resources leads an international elite to act with all the moral delicacy of monkeys and to put millions of people’s lives at risk.

So it goes.

However, the West can still save a little face in this situation, and it can take actions to buck up the Ukraine so that it does not suffer a similar fate. But if the wrong steps are taken, Russia could inflict a massive humiliation. Hanging Saakashvili like Saddam, like Mussolini…that would be a terrible blow.

It’s hard to believe just how monumental the failure of the Bush administration has become, and just how thoroughly the son has destroyed the positive legacy of his father.