Russia's back, and it will kick your ass

It's G-8 time, and Russia is host. Couldn't come at a better time for Russia, really, as $78-a-barrel oil has billions pouring in its coffers. That and the announcement that it will be backing a $7 billion gas pipeline project going from Iran to Pakistan and India.

As Mark Ames and later Stephen Cohen illustrated in their essays overviewing U.S. foreign policy toward Russia in the Bush era, Dick Cheney and the Houston boys had a big plot to contain Russia and steal away its old territories, and while it worked for a time, those days are over. All of those colored Revolutions in the former Soviet Republics are practically meaningless at this point.

The eXile's latest editorial on the appearance of Russian forces in Iraq sums up the new state of things, and where we can expect them to go, channeling Joe Pesci:

Russia is going to come in like a white knight, like a stern yet effect parent, and clean up li'l America's mess in the sandbox known as Iraq. Because as the only responsible adults left in the neighborhood, Russia simply has no other choice...

While Americans approach the Iraq quagmire like good hard-working schoolboys, trying to solve problems with teacher-pleasing complicated coalition-building schemes and military feints, advances, and PR, the Russians have proven that by behaving like an adult and sticking to good' ol' fashioned killing or disappearing half the population, you can solve these kinds of problems.

You don't hear much about Chechnya these days, do you? Not the way you hear about Iraq, not even close. That's because out of a prewar population of 1.3 million, today Chechnya only has about 300,000 people left. That's just the number to the right of the dot in 1.3. If I was one of the guys on the right side of that decimal, I'd be pretty quite too, for a long, long time.