People are going to begin to wonder if Russia can be trusted

In an interview on Meet the Press, Condi Rice came out in support of Russian intervention in South Ossetia. The problem, and evidently the only problem, she has with the Russo-Georgian War, is that the Russians Went Too Far:

once this broke out in South Ossetia, it could have been confined to South Ossetia. Rather than confine it to that and deal with the facts on the ground there, the Russians decided to go deeper into Georgia, to bomb Georgian ports, to bomb Georgian military installations, to go into the city of Gori. ... But we need to keep the focus on the culprit here, and the culprit here is that Russia overreached, used disproportionate force against a small neighbor... What the Russians did was to unfortunately go well beyond the zone of conflict and threaten Georgian institutions.

Naturally, she was not asked what precisely she meant by “deal with the facts on the ground there,” but her characterization of South Ossetia as an area in which it was legitimate for Russian troops (which she repeatedly calls peacekeepers) to attack Georgians strongly suggests that she is prepared to oversee the transfer of the breakaway provinces to Russia. Someone should ask her to clarify, but none of the hosts of the three Sunday talk shows she went on today did so.


She did warn Russia of the severe consequences for its actions: “People are going to begin to wonder if Russia can be trusted.”