Melik Kaylan, the fellow who in 2007 wrote a pretty popular travel piece about spending time in the Mikheil Saakashvili entourage, has a Georgia war anniversary opinion published on Forbes:
The West has furnished way too many levers and excuses to Moscow propagandists in recent years, from the instability in Iraq to the recent collapse in the global economy. Russia's proffered alternative grows closer and closer to the Soviet one daily: command economies, Russian-backed political elites, subsidized industries, protected jobs, state-owned media--the whole gamut. Plenty of folks, especially those in power, in numerous countries from Venezuela to Uzbekistan now consider this a viable alternative. If an iron curtain should descend across the globe anew, we have to decide who to save and how much to sacrifice. Solzhyenitsyn once said that the Russians were more likely to triumph in the long run because they were more accustomed to suffering and sacrifice. The Soviet collapse proved him wrong, for a while. His words may yet come back to haunt us.Kind of reminds me of that clip from the Simpsons when the Soviet Union was "just faking" that it had collapsed...
