This last weekend, Georgia and Russia went to war over a piece of land called South Ossetia. If you're just becoming aware of this situation now, the BBC has an excellent
Q&A article on this war. I'm not going to go in-depth by regurgitating the news, but I'm going to make some observations.
First, I'd like to note how poor the American media coverage over this event has been. For in-depth coverage, I've been relying on the
BBC and the
Times Online. These news outlets gave some really good analysis and information about the conflict, and background in it.
The other point I wanted to note was how seemingly useless the United Nations is in these kinds of circumstances. The Europeans and Americans wanted to use the UN to protest Russia's disproportionate use of force against Georgia; however, that never came to being because Russia is a permanent member of the UN, and is able to veto any statements. So, there's a bit of a conflict of interest there, and the UN can hardly be treated as a neutral broker in this case.
Another sad note is how impotent Europe and America seems in this whole situation. Their ally, Georgia, needed help, and all the Americans could do was give their soldiers a ride back home from Iraq. (Georgia had 2,000 soldiers fighting in Iraq, and they needed to withdraw them to help fight the Russians). It was said that Europe couldn't do much against Russia either, since Russia supplies 20% of Europe's oil and gas. It's situations like these where I think energy independence really makes sense, because it allows you to not be bullied around by the bad guy.
In terms of the actual fighting, it's interesting how warfare has evolved. There were reports that the Russians were attacking Georgia's websites; this is known as cyberwarfre. Wired is running an article entitled, "
Estonia, Google Help 'Cyberlocked' Georgia.
Civil.ge, the Georgian news site, is "under permanent [cyber] attack." So they've switched their operations to one of Google's Blogspot domains, to keep the information flowing about what's going on in their country.
The attacks against Civil.ge are part of a larger set of online assaults, originating in Russia, against Georgian websites.
"In a sense," notes Jim Stogdill, "they must be saying 'we can't keep our sites up, but we don't think [Russian hackers] can take down Blogspot, given Google's much better infrastructure and ability to defend it.'"
It's quite interesting that they decided to move key sites onto the Google network. If there's anyone in the world that could survive a cyberwar, it'd probably be Google. What would be even more interesting is if Russia decided to attack Google, and Google retaliated. I'm thinking Google could probably send Russia's internet back to the digital stone age. Anyway, I think in any modern conflict now, going after information infrastructure is just as important as taking on military targets. I've seen reports of Russia attacking Georgian cellphone towers, radars, and phone exchanges.
