Who do we believe?

I checked my e-mail as soon as I got up this morning. MSN had a story about Russain troops withdrawing from the native city of Stalin, Gori. I heaved a bit of a sigh of relief.

Then I read further:

The first of two planned U.S. aid flights arrived in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi late Wednesday, carrying cots, blankets and medicine for refugees displaced by the fighting. The shipment arrived on a C-17 military plane, an illustration of the close U.S.-Georgia military cooperation that has angered Russia.

So what? Russia's angry? That just matches up with what I've heard about our own nuts blaming us for Russia's invasion of a neighboring country. Honestly, people, how is it our fault?We didn't give passports and citizenship papers to two regions in a neighboring country. We didn't encourage those provinces to rebel. We certainly did not tell Russia to invade on the excuse that they were "only aiding Russian citizens upon their request. " So how is it our fault?

Oh, wait, there's more! It looks like the Soviet Union isn't withdrawing after all! And the Russian foreign minister has said to "forget any talk about Georgia's territorial integrity."

Not that I think it'll do any good, but our own Ms. Rice has gone over there. She says, "This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed." They certainly have, but not for the better: I sincerely doubt that the United States has the ability, at this point, to do anything. Europe simply doesn't have the will.

Victor Davis Hanson of Townhall and National Review sums up why Russia's going to get away with what it's doing:

"…what a richer but more critical world has forgotten is that in large part America was the model, not the villain -- and that postwar globalization was always a form of engaged Americanization that enriched and protected billions.

Yet globalization, in all its manifestations, will run out of steam the moment we tire of fueling it, as the world returns instead to the mindset of the 1930s -- with protectionist tariffs; weak, disarmed democracies; an isolationist America; predatory dictatorships; and a demoralized gloom-and-doom Western elite.

Brace yourself -- we may be on our way back to an old world, where the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer as they must."