Over at NRO’s Corner, Punditissimo Jonah Goldberg wonders why the heck Obama’s response is to refer the Ossetian War to the UN Security Council. I’d have thought the answer was obvious: the left’s innate aversion to any sort of positive foreign policy not following “the international community” as embodied in the UN. See my intemperate diatribe about hippies and Darfur below. It kicks the ball down the street, avoiding any risk of failure and allowing for lots of ex post facto diplomatic chin-pulling and negotiating; plus, the only downside is a bunch of dead foreigners in obscurity. This is the Rwanda Gambit.

And I suspect Jonah’s reader is right about China. Pique about the Olympics will take second place to keeping Tibet, Turkestan, and Taiwan within the imperium. And honestly, in most places, has the war really knocked the Olympics off of anyone’s radar? I’m looking an airport TV with boxers from Ukraine and China punching each other out. The dead of the Caucasus, I hate to say, will likely be soon forgotten, while those supercool fireworks at the opening ceremonies will be on DVD forever.

Picture from Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) via Wikipedia: “Deep gashes delivered by the killers are visible in the skulls that fill one room at the Murambi School. [Rwanda]”

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.