The fictional reply: Insert a Peacekeeping Brigade (PKB). Call it a Peacekeeping Organization (PKO) if you want to give it an extra diplomatic smudge.<\/p>\n
\nA peacekeeping brigade comprises at least two engineer battalions with attached military police, medical, Civil Affairs, signal units and lots of media connectivity. Cameras matter. Add State Department personnel. Add Special Forces with their linguistic talents and a light infantry battalion for local security. Embed non-governmental organizations with the guts to participate and promise support to NGOs who choose to operate on their own but would accept clean water and blankets. Why, Mr. President, you can help the human shields. Aren’t they heading for Georgia to stop a super-power invasion? Tell the human shields our peacekeeping outfit will give them MREs and bandaids while they chain themselves to Georgian churches to protect them from Russian bombs.<\/p>\n
\nInsert the PKB in a Russo-Georgia type situation and the emerging democracy gets on-the-ground support. The PKB is not an offensive military force, but an airborne brigade at the end of a long logistical tether isn’t either. The PKB serves as a military-diplomatic “transition signal” – Texas Hold’em and the emerging democracy get some of the value of a combat speed bump, while reducing though not eliminating the risks of inserting combat forces.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There’s more, as well as a really good analysis of the problem we face…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Austin Bay on the problem in Georgia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}