[taxonomy]

I believe you grossly underestimate the history of Russia and a Caucus region. Chechnya, Azerbaijan, and by extension Yugoslavia are not at all aberrations. The Russians know that widespread ethnic and or religious revolt in the area would be putting a match to tinderbox. The "stans" e.g Turkmenistan etc. are more or less strongman regimes a la Saddam's Iraq and form a buffer zone for the USSR.

Also the Russian memory of "operation Barbarossa" Hitler's superfabulous foray into Russia are still pretty fresh. That was basically the first resource war. Hitler was after the oil fields east of Stalingrad. There were a staggering million casualties at Stalingrad alone. Take a look at a list of the top casualties of all battles ever and see where Hitler's drive east ranks, it is totally unreal. Nobody, nobody knows the cost of all out resource war better than the Russians. May I add that this was done with piston driven aircraft and bolt action rifles.

As long and the US polices the region the Russians are free to criticize our actions and not foot the bill. The extent to which we could blackmail Russia with this potential chaos is astronomical.

This, of course means that we would have to have a solution to a problem that was not 100% (in reality) American troops.

Bush 1 failure in Gulf War round 1 was not waiting and building an international recognition that everyone has to chip in to stabilize the sitation. We should have let Kuwait burn until it hurt China and Europe. Then we should have moved with real multinational backing. I mean real.

Now with the US staggering around like a white boxer in a heavyweight title fight, just being punished round after round by an opponent that wont send us to the matt everyone there knows that the effect of behaving badly is pretty low. There is no credible threat for the Palistianians or the Iranians. Everyone is like, "oh, the Americans will deal with it."

I have no problem with making sure there is a western military presence to make sure that the whole of science based civilization doesn't go in the shitter becuase the bastard child of the Ottoman Empire burns to the ground. We just could have been waaaaaaaay smarter about it.

Fuck all. If you're going to talk about the price of gas and international politics you have to talk about the fact that the oil is sold through two exchanges that deal only in dollars and how that effects borrowing and the M1. You have to talk how OPEC works with that. You have to talk about how the neocons drove down the food for oil because it threatend to trade oil in Euros, you have to talk about how China was tryign to buy long term futures in Yen, you have to talk about how Chevron had the Taliban to Texas when negotiating the pipeline through Afghanistan.

$10 gas? ha.

Pick your cartoon president but ride to work.