Georgia says Russians pulling out of Gori

Russia good move, now you will get more victories in Beijing.

Agreed.

While billions of people around the world are watching the exciting Beijing game 2008,few thousands people in Goergia lost their lives in matter of hours,how tragic!What can Russia now do to make those dead people live again?What those states of former USSR will think about Russia now?I bet they won't give up in front of agression but will bear a deep resentment/fear toward Russia,and America will start to make its move.Things may be just starting...and they do not look good.

tclh Let's keep opur fingers crossed and hope that sanity and reason rule.

PS Please insert spaces after commas and full stops/periods/question marks. That would make your posts easier on the eye! Thanks! :)

So, does this mean its over?

raising the possibility they could try to stay in Georgia proper under the justification of protecting their troops in South Ossetia." Well, I hope this small amount of people are satisfied now! Do they become part of Russia or will they have independence?

Russians pulling out of Gori. That's a start.

How far back will they pull back? That's one of the big questions, also. < :-)

That's what they say but BBC coberage says otherwise from people on the ground. Russia needs to end this quickly and Geaorgia needs to be very careful not to wake the bear again.

Russians are still planning to stay in Georgia's S. Ossetia.

America and the old Soviet Republics aren't just nervous, every single country that had to fear the USSR in the past are nervous as heck.

NATO may either do a more bold move into Soviet Republics to deter Russian force, or shy away and let Russia dominate them.

Digby: Putin occupied a fractious republic because the US is being bled dry trying to control Iraq/Afghanistan.

Nice job, ("I got a sese of Putin's soul") W. and (Soviet specialist) Condi. Georgians were hoping the US would come to their rescue, and W did everything to encourage them to believe that he would, enticing Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.

Yglesias adds: 'This highlights the fact that, popular as bluster-based policymaking is on the American right, it can have some extremely high costs'.

Remember the fallout from Gulf War I, when Poppy's promises were met with blank looks during the Shia uprising? It was horrible for the Iraqis. It was a great benefit, however, to the neocons who pimped that story for years as some sort of failure of American honor which led to Gulf War II, or the Greatest Strategic Blunder in US History.

Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Russia's attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition...we will continue to have globalization, economic interdependence, the European Union and other efforts to build a more perfect international order. But these will compete with and at times be overwhelmed by the harsh realities of international life that have endured since time immemorial.

In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz famously wrote a defense document that reemerged as the neocon PNAC manifesto "Rebuilding America's Defenses." That original document contained a plan to repel a Russian military assault on a former republic...

In 2008, W stayed at the Olympics, held up the US flag backwards and generally made a fool of himself, as Russia repossessed Georgia.

Jackson: The neoconservatives surrounding Bush and Cheney touted America as the new "unipower." They scorned the "reality-based community," because as one told Ron Suskind, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Welcome to that new reality...our military is overstretched and depleted; it's short of troops for Afghanistan, much less for taking on the Russians in Georgia. Even neocons like Bill Kristol settle for urging international sanctions, and arms aid to the Georgians. Good luck with enforcing economic sanctions on Russia, Europe's vital source of natural gas and oil. Despite all the loose talk of making Georgia a NATO ally, Georgians are discovering that they are on their own.

Putin, Russia's strongman, has systematically eroded democratic freedoms inside Russia. As oil revenues have improved Russia's fortunes, he has started to reassert pressure on the former republics of the old Soviet Union -- with a particular eye to consolidating Russia's oil economy. He is now taking advantage of America's exhaustion. And he's demonstrating that he, like George Bush, is prepared to trample international law to assert his power.

Once more, innocent civilians will bear the cost of this "demonstration." Once more, lawlessness makes all of us less safe. http://www.suntimes.com/news/jackson/1102553,CST-EDT-jesse12.article