A major newspaper (other than the Christian Science Monitor) in the United States has published a sensible and relatively evenhanded OP-ED on Russia-Georgia. Michael Dobbs:

t didn’t take long for the “Putin is Hitler” analogies to start following the eruption of the ugly little war between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia. Neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia with the Nazi grab of the Sudetenland in 1938. President Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said that the Russian leader was following a course “that is horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s.”

Others invoked the infamous Brezhnev doctrine, under which Soviet leaders claimed the right to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe in order to prop up their crumbling imperium. “We’ve seen this movie before, in Prague and Budapest,” said John McCain, referring to the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956. According to the Republican presidential candidate,”today we are all Georgians.”

Actually, the events of the past week in Georgia have little in common with either Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II or Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. They are better understood against the backdrop of the complicated ethnic politics of the Caucasus, a part of the world where historical grudges run deep and oppressed can become oppressors in the bat of an eye.”

And to think I had thought that the only people allowed to express their views in our influential media outlets were either (1) Neoconservatives or (2) Clinton-administration officials–all of whom have a very strong stake in a particular understanding of the conflict.