The Crimean Republic is a semi-autonomous region at the southern end of the Ukraine which juts out into the Black Sea. It used to be part of the Russian SSR during the Soviet Union, until the mid-50s when Khrushchev granted its territory as a gift to the Ukrainian SSR.

The Ukrainian SSR's nominal ownership of the Crimea didn't make much difference during the Soviet era, but when the Ukraine became independent in 1991, it found itself with a strategically vital piece of Black Sea waterfront, with the biggest military port in the region. Since independence, the Ukraine has leased out a big part of the port, Sevastopol, to the Russian navy's Black Sea fleet.

The Ukraine also got ownership of a big 'Dnepr' missile defense radar on a spit of land jutting into the Black Sea just southwest of the military harbor at Sevastopol - one of only fifteen LPAR radars built across Soviet territory from the late 60s to late 80s to warn of American nuclear attack. (Some of the sites have been shut down since). Russia now pays Ukraine more than a million dollars a year for data from that radar and another at Mukachevo.

The population of the Crimea is mostly Russian rather than Ukrainian, and that, coupled with the Russian military presence and strong strategic value of the Crimea, have led some to speculate that Russia may try to reestablish some kind of closer control of the region. I think that's a distant long shot, and relations between Russia and Ukraine would have to get a lot worse than they ever have been, before I'd take the possibility seriously. But evidently people over at BBC are thinking about it...

One clarification bears noting - the 'vessel' the Americans sent to deliver the aid was an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, a modern and exquisitely destructive piece of navy hardware that could go toe-to-toe with pretty much anything the Russians have in the Black Sea. This includes, arguably, their Black Sea flagship Moskva, a Cold war-era heavy missile cruiser based in Sevastopol, which I took a picture of when I was in the Crimea a couple of years ago.

Sending a Burke-class DDG into a port held by Russian forces in a war zone seemed like an extreme provocation to me when I heard about it - I guess the Pentagon decided it wasn't worth the risk.

But I'm even more impressed with Michelle's speech last night - much more human and delivered nearly flawlessly. And the big difference between Michelle, and Hillary, Barack and most of the other speakers at the show, was that Hillary and Barack and the others are professional politicians - public speaking in front of big crowds is what they do for a living, and you would expect them to knock an important speech like this out of the box.

Michelle Obama isn't a professional speaker, and to deliver that kind of performance in front of 75,000 people at the convention and another few million on live TV is a really mindblowing thing. The biggest crowd I ever had to speak to was 600 in Istanbul a couple of years ago. It was a huge rush but it wasn't easy. 75,000?? Come on...

She's really an extraordinary woman.

Obama - Virginia Governor Tim Kaine
McCain - Florida Governor Charlie Crist

It’s the Russians’ fault

Georgia and their allies claim that the Russians reacted with disproportionate force after the Georgians attacked South Ossetia. Russian mechanized infantry and tank units, supported by air power and artillery (including medium range tactical bombers from Russia) staged a counter invasion from Ossetia into central Georgia, taking the key city of Gori. Russia also landed troops in Abkhazia (which was not directly involved in this round of fighting) and those troops then invaded Georgia from the west. The Russians are also doing little if anything to stop paramilitary militias from Ossetia and Abkhazia from looting Georgian homes & businesses within the breakaway regions and by some accounts within Georgia itself.

More subtly though, Russia has supported South Ossetia and Abkhazia since the formation of the state of Georgia. The frequent violence that often takes place between pro-Russian militias in those regions and the regular Georgian government forces couldn’t take place without some level of Russian support. The Georgians would say that much of the anti-Georgian violence is directly orchestrated by Russia.

As I mentioned in April, a Russian air force fighter tore through Georgian airspace to kill an unmanned drone patrolling over Abkhazia. So it's clear there's at least some level of communication and support between Russia and the rebels.

Also, Georgia is claiming that the blinding speed of the Russian counterattack indicates that the Russians had been planning some kind of military action all along. Is it possible the initial attacks by South Ossetian militias last week were intended to provoke a larger attack by Georgia, thus opening the door to a Russian invasion?

It’s the Georgians’ fault

The Russians and Ossetians claim that the Georgian attack into South Ossetia was unprovoked and excessive. The South Ossetian capitol of Tskhinvali was severely damaged in the fighting, and the residents claim that the Georgians used heavy artillery and attack airplanes to indiscriminately bomb the city before the Georgian ground forces moved in. Russia claims that the Georgians created a human rights disaster in South Ossetia, which could only be stopped by a massive Russian invasion (some on the Russian side are calling the action a ‘peacekeeping effort’).

The further invasion into Georgia was, Russia claims, necessary to knock out Georgian military targets and neutralize military equipment that could be used against Ossetia. Their position is that just as NATO smashed Serbia from the air to stop Serbian aggression in Kosovo in 1999, Russia needed to smash Georgia to stop Georgian aggression in South Ossetia. (Adding a bit of literary color, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev called Georgian troops “lunatics.”)

While some in the West may say the two situations are very different, the Russian media has been airing reports that Georgian troops indiscriminately killed Ossetian civilians, including crushing them with tanks as they tried to flee. And before we come down too hard on the Russian media for lying about human rights abuses, we should remember that when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, there were similar exaggerated reports of atrocities against civilians that justified American action in the Gulf War. For example, Kuwaitis testified before Congress that Iraqi soldiers looted Kuwaiti hospitals, pillaged the maternity wards, and threw premature babies out of their incubators onto the floor. None of it actually happened.

As to the claim that Russia was able to move so quickly only because the invasion was premeditated, the Russians had a massive amount of hardware just across the Georgian border in Chechnya, which continues to be a hot spot. The Russian mechanized garrisons based in Grozny were just a few hours drive from Tskhinvali, and the air power was already in place and only needed to be re-tasked from bases in the Russian Caucasus.

We should expect Russia to continue equating Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, and demanding that he be removed from power and even held for war crimes, the way Milosevic was.

That seems extremely unlikely to happen, and if it doesn’t, the Russians will claim that the West – especially the Americans – are using a double standard in international politics. Russian allies like Milosevic are sent to the Hague to die in captivity, while American allies like Saakashvili are allowed to remain in power. Which brings me to…

It’s the Americans’ fault

Russia has never fully recognized that South Ossetia and Abkhazia belong to Georgia, and have complained bitterly about the American military aid that has helped arm and train Georgian forces. Russia is even more furious about the idea of Georgia (and Ukraine) being considered for NATO membership. And the Russian leadership now says that arming a man like Saakashvili, whom they consider so dangerous, only emboldened him to take the fatal step of invading South Ossetia.

By Russian thinking, pulling the breakaway regions away from Georgia is also payback for the Americans having pulled Kosovo away from Serbia, Russia’s most western ally in Europe.

A statement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov really gives a window into their mindset. "…A choice will have to be made someday between considerations of prestige related to an illusory project [Georgian independence] and a real partnership [with Russia] in matters which indeed require collective efforts."

In other words, he says America should throw the Georgians under the bus, and choose a partnership with Russia in order to manage the instabilities of the world together.

And the American view? Well, Condi Rice responded, "As to choosing, the United States has made very clear that it is standing by the democratically elected government of Georgia."

So who is to blame for this mess, and where does it leave us now?

Yeah, it’s complicated.

You see the plane, an Su-25 attack jet, diving to hit some targets a couple of klicks away from the cameraman. Then the Sukhoi pulls up and over, seems to notice the journalists (the pilot probably just saw sunlight reflecting from their vehicles or maybe from the camera lens), and noses in towards the camera. Everyone, sensibly, runs for their lives.

The Sukhoi pickles off a couple of unguided rockets which land on the road just about where the cameraman had been standing a few seconds earlier. Blind luck that the jet missed, and blind luck that the pilot hadn’t decided to spray a full salvo of rockets to saturate the area, rather than just two or three.

In the next scene the journalists are driving frantically away in their car, panting with adrenalin from their narrow escape, and also fear - for they must also know that a moving vehicle is the easiest target to detect and kill from the air.

So someone please tell me why it is that when I see this footage, I regret, for the first time in a long time, having chosen a safe job in a big multinational, over a job that involves running for my life and panting in fear?

And damn it, but the Georgian separatist regions were the model I used for a major plotline of this book I've been trying to write for the last five years. It's not rational or even the least bit smart, but at the moment I really wonder what the fuck I'm doing sitting here in a hotel room in Portland, and why I'm not over there watching it all, recording it as it happens, and telling this story.

First, some background. Georgia is a former Soviet Republic that broke away from the Union when the Soviet empire collapsed. While most of Georgia was happy to gain independence, two regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, preferred to remain part of Russia. There was a short, sharp civil war at the beginning of the '90s that left the situation in a stalemate. The separatist regions did not re-join Russia or gain independence from Georgia, but they were allowed to maintain control of their governments and territory, with the protection of Russia to ensure their autonomy. The situation has remained tense for the last 15 years, with frequent small scale battles between separatist forces and the Georgian army and police.

From what I've gathered so far, it looks like the Georgians used one of these small scale battles as a pretext for a deep strike into South Ossetia, using Georgian mechanized and armor units supported by aviation. This wasn't a skirmish but a real invasion. The Georgians took the Ossetians by surprise and had control of the rebel capitol by end of the day last Friday.

The Russian response should have been predictable - they came down with a hundred-kilo steel hammer. Looks like they pulled armor, mechanized and special operations forces out of Chechnya (which lies just to the northeast), and used artillery and air power to pound the tar out of the Georgians, who were forced to scamper out of South Ossetia and try to catch their breath.

Then the Russians used their air power to pound the Georgian rally points so the Georgians couldn't regroup. They poured more ground forces into Ossetia, and used their Black Sea fleet to land 4000 troops into Abkhazia. Today (Monday, August 11), the troops from Abkhazia pushed into Georgia from the west. At the moment it's not clear if there is a full-scale invasion of Georgia underway, but the bulk of the Georgian army has pulled back to defend Tbilisi, the capitol.

So far the international community has made some ineffective protests and finger-wagging, but there's absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop the Russians at this point. Europe has no diplomatic options because they get more than half their energy supplies from Russia - and Russia has shown, as in the case of the Ukraine - that they're willing to turn off the heat in the winter if their customers displease them. The US has little power here because they're tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they need Russia to keep the pressure on Iran in order to slow the Iranian nuclear program (the civilian components of which are supplied by Russia).

The only real actions taken so far were the Ukrainians refusing to allow the Russian Black Sea fleet to return to their port at Sevastopol, in Ukrainian territory, and the Americans airlifting a thousand Georgian troops from their base in Iraq back to Tbilisi, where the Georgians have much greater need for them.

On the face of it, the initial Georgian attack into South Ossetia wasn't a smart move. They counted on the fighting to be over before the Russians could respond, but this was a bet on slim margins, and the Georgians got burned.

Georgians are patriots but they're not Chechen fanatics, and it doesn't seem as if the small, secular Georgian population is willing to sacrifice itself wholesale, the way the Chechens did, in order to bleed the Russian army to a stalemate. The Georgians have gone on a weapons-buying spree over the past few years to equip their army, but this type of conventional war is a war the Russians are very good at and know how to win.

While it seems that the Georgians brought this on themselves, it is a sad outcome. At minimum, the defeat will rattle Georgian democracy and push the country towards more radical politics in the future. Georgian entry to NATO, already a shaky prospect, is no longer an option for the foreseeable future. Russia's guarantee of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is now permanent, and these regions (along with other trouble spots like Transdnestria in Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan) will continue to put a big question mark over the security situation in the Caucasus.

Why is this important? Oh yeah, the usual... oil. There are huge, largely untapped oil & natural gas fields in the Caspian basin, and the best way to get this energy to the West is through the Caucasus. In 2005 a consortium of western companies built the BTC pipeline from Baku on the Caspian coast in Azerbaijan, through Georgia, to Turkey and the Mediterranean. The project cost about 4 billion dollars just for the pipeline, and the value of that transit route is much higher.

My take on this is that the Russians will slap Georgia hard, destroying most of the new equipment the Georgian military has bought and keeping the lights off in Tbilisi for a few days or weeks. I don't think Russia has much to gain by trying to annex the separatist regions. (Abkhazia and South Ossetia can cause more trouble by remaining in a legal and diplomatic grey zone). I don't think Russia will stay in Georgia or take control of the BTC pipeline - they don't want to push Europe & the Americans too hard, and that pipeline is too precious to destroy. I think eventually they'll withdraw and build new bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia to keep an eye on the Georgians in the future - and it will be a lesson to other former republics, above all Azerbaijan and Ukraine, that Russia is back on the world stage (as it always has been) and is not to be trifled with.

There is a lot at stake here, and we can't afford to ignore it.

Full tank of gas - check. Beef jerky to kill road hunger - check. iPod playlist full of four straight hours of aggressive electro -check.

San Francisco was great, as it's always been. I took Cecilie, Magnus and Kajsa to most of my old bars & hangouts - Noc Noc & Toronado on Lower Haight, Warakubune on Church (Tiffany the waitress still remembers me from the 90s!!), Lucky 13 and the rest. It was great to see family and old friends (cheers and due creds to Ananda, Kavita, Marissa, Marcella, Marton, Nada, Jake & Jesus!) Wish you could have been there Jeremy & Diana, but hope you're raising a glass in Switzerland.

I'm glad I went, and I'm glad I was there with Cecilie & crowd - it helps to overwrite the old vibes with the new. Also, it's a different experience having a car this time - I was perfectly happy being carless for five years when I lived there, but it's nice being able to skip town and hit Sonoma & Redwoods country. I just wish it could have been a little warmer!

Feels strange to be back at work now, coming back online and hearing about the hot war in Georgia. Now traveling again already. I still feel disassociated. I want to write again - badly - but have no time.

Some kind of funny synchronicity, and I guess the music is putting me in the mood for the city. It's just that there's a hell of a lot about what happened in San Francisco, at the end, that I'd prefer not to remember. I've been too busy to think about it till it came up just now, surfacing through the music.

I hope this is going to work.

Back in Seattle and into a few weeks of madhouse workload - there's usually a lull after the July conferences because people are too exhausted to work for a week or two afterwards, but not this time. It's good though - I got what I needed done, and I think I'm in-role long enough now to get the hang of the new job.

Last weekend Deborah drove down from Vancouver with an extra NIN ticket (merci beaucoup Deborah!). Great show - Trent had these semitransparent metal screens with LEDs all over them descend across the stage in front of and behind the band, so the LEDs would create these wild pictures and patterns (some phonecame pictures here). I've never seen stage visuals like that before.

Now Magnus and Kajsa are here from Sweden, and tomorrow morning we're all cramming into my little Honda Civic and barreling down the Pacific Coast to San Francisco. I've never done the drive before and people say it's great. We're going to stay overnight in Eureka and see the Redwoods. Then to SF where all kinds of fun awaits. Can't wait to hook up with the SF crowd again (Marton - it will great to see you before you go back to Hungary!). And fuck knows I've needed a vacation lately.

Love you all, as ever.

The big conferences are good though because it pulls everyone together from wherever they're based - people you're on email with from Denmark, Germany, UK, Singapore, Quebec, but never get to see outside of Denver, Dallas, Munich, Toronto, or whichever weird city they're sending you this time. And everyone's going through the same disassociated Lost in Translation hotel-life experience, so there's a real feeling of comradeship & solidarity, carried through on that infrastructure of jetlag, chronic fatigue and alcohol. It can be good sometimes, when it works.

I hope it will be good this time.

It's a mean-spirited thing for me to do, but I swore fifteen years ago that I would toast that self-righteous jerk the day I learned he passed on to the netherworld. And so this morning I raised a glass of the cheapest whiskey in the cabinet.

I hope that Senator Helms is resting in the peace, grace and equanimity that he worked so hard to deny to others.

But I just heard today that the way the Colombian special forces were able to get the rebels to let them close to the hostages was by posing as aid workers that were supposedly bringing food and medicine.

I think that's a really bad and irresponsible idea, because it now casts suspicion on anyone who from now on will claim to belong to an international NGO, and it directly threatens the lives of aid workers around the world. What rebel group is going risk negotiating with the real aid orgs now?

It used to be a favorite tactic of CIA agents to pose as journalists in the field, until the CIA was forced to stop doing it in the 1970s because they were getting too many real journalists killed. I wish the Colombian military had behaved with the same restraint.

I'm glad the 15 Colombian hostages are free, but I have a bad feeling that this operation is going to end up killing a lot more than 15 people in the long run.

Seven months left and counting...

I wandered through a section of medieval illuminated books filled with religious iconography and bound in stamped leather. Then through a tack and sail-themed section filled with rolled up nautical charts and schematic drawings of sailing ships and old pre-Dreadnought armored cruisers from a hundred twenty years ago.

Then I entered a section of globes and atlases - rolled up parchments bound with ribbon or leather. I chose one dark, heavy parchment and unrolled it, revealing an incomplete, hand-painted map of the world that could have come from Drake's time. Only the western coastlines of North and South America were sketched in, and in the wide blank space of the Pacific, the words "Terra Incognita," and a large coiled sea dragon.

Another table-sized chart with ragged edges showed a number of small circles widely spaced from each other and connected by faint lines, the way Victor airways connect distant VORTAC beacons on an aviation chart. Ringing each circle were a series of dots, each circle with a different number of dots of varying size. Next to some of the circles was a hand-printed word, but the parchment was very old and the words were smudged. I was able to read only two of them - the words Deneb and Centauri.

I woke up to the sound of thunder.