Who Poked the Bear?

"But in the end, the warnings failed to stop the Georgian president -- a Bush favorite -- from launching an attack last week. . . .

"Pentagon officials said that despite having 130 trainers assigned to Georgia, they had no advance notice of Georgia's sudden move last Thursday to send thousands of Georgian troops into South Ossetia to capture that province's capital, Tskhinvali."

But consider this: "At the same time, U.S. officials said that they believed they had an understanding with Russia that any response to Georgian military action would be limited to South Ossetia.

"'We knew they were going to go crack heads. We told them again and again not to do this,' [a] State Department official said. 'We thought we had an understanding with the Russians that any response would be South Ossetia-focused. Clearly it's not.'"

Either way, one big question is why U.S. intelligence wasn't up to speed. Surely the kinds of troop movements involved -- on both sides -- should have set off some alarms?

Well, not if everyone was looking the other way.

Landay writes: "One problem in under-estimating the Russian response, another U.S. official said, was 'a dearth of intelligence assets in the region.'

"U.S. 'national technical means,' the official name for spy satellites and other technology, are 'pretty well consumed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan,' the official said, and there was only limited monitoring of Russian military movements toward the Georgian border.

"Additionally, the United States had lost access to vital information when Russia dropped out of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in December to protest U.S. plans to build missile defense sites in Europe.

"Under the treaty, Russia had been required to exchange reports on troop, armor and aircraft deployments with the United States and other members on a monthly basis. But once Russia dropped out, that information was no longer available."

The Leverage Problem

The recurring theme in today's news coverage is that Bush has very little leverage in this situation.

Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush said yesterday that Russia's military attacks in Georgia may be designed to unseat the pro-U.S. government there, a move he warned would represent a 'dramatic and brutal escalation' of a conflict that American officials have begun to describe as a return to Cold War-style aggression.