Instead of spending the weekend watching the Olympics and enjoying some summer downtime with my family (like I assume many of this blog’s readers were planning on doing), I found myself up to my neck in newspapers, on the phone, and glued to the web and TV as I watched with horror Russia’s first invasion of a foreign sovereign state since the 1979 Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. Anyone familiar with the lethal efficiency of the Russian military’s recent domestic campaigns in Chechnya and elsewhere knew that things were going to get uglier and uglier, and that the disproportionate bombing campaigns would seek to achieve a “shock and awe” type effect, taking out many casualties. There’s been a deluge of analysis out there, which hopefully we have robustly represented in earlier posts, and I only wish to add a few thoughts to these senseless and unnecessary events. Nearing the end of the day here in Europe, and having consumed about enough media on the subject to feel spin-dizzy, I am struck by several observations, mistaken assumptions in the media, and larger ideas about potential scenarios.