Is that a saber in your pocket, or are you just unhappy to see me?

I'll admit a good deal of ignorance on the relationship between Russia, and the now independent states which used to be part of the Soviet Union.

But this I know, a country which has preemptively invaded a sovereign nation has no right to criticize a country which had done the same. The US no longer has moral ground to stand upon to criticize Russia for invading Georgia, when we invaded Iraq, for reasons which now can be seen as specious, at best, and at worst, similar in justification to Russia's invasion.

Worse still, two of the prominent promoters of war in Iraq Senators Lindsey Graham, and Connecticut's own Creepy Joe™ Lieberman, are at a more severe moral ebb tide than many other Americans who protested the invasion of Iraq.

Graham and Lieberman have co-authored an editorial on the Russian invasion of Georgia in today's Washington Post. Glenn Greenwald critiques it here.

The co-authors are shocked that Russia: spent last week destroying the country's infrastructure, including roads, bridges, port and security facilities. This was more than random looting. It was a deliberate campaign to collapse the economy of Georgia, in the hope of taking the government down with it.

Sounds like the techniques the US used in Iraq, and which Graham and Lieberman supported.

The pair is also aghast at: the innocent men, women and children displaced by the fighting, some of whom we saw last week. Would that this pair of death angels felt the same about the tens of thousands of dead and wounded innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that Lieberman could find a shred of empathy for any dead or wounded Palestinian child.

It's beginning to appear that the apocalypse twins haven't found a war they don't like - Iraq, Russia, Palestine, Iran, Syria. Bring 'em on.

Many commentators are concluding that the disastrous conflict between Russia and Georgia was propelled by an incompetent foreign policy, initiated by the Bush administration, which coddled the belligerent Putin, and urged on a naive and reckless drive for democracy by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.