>You mean the war the Russians declined to get involved in, where it
>was merely their allies (not Russian citizens) who were being
>attacked? That war? Against. Why do you ask?
I won't pursue this, because you think the category citizen warrants a change in when intervention is acceptable or necessary. I don't, and so I think it's probably useless for us to try to talk about it.
>I was using "extreme violence" to mean things like indiscriminate
>shelling of civilian targets, as opposed to the kind of (mostly) low
>intensity operations used by the British here.
You mean "low intensity" like indiscriminately firing into crowds and killing dozens?
That's not me trying to be a smartass. The bombing experienced by the South Ossetians ten days ago was just the militaristic punctuation of a violence they've lived with by existing between two nationalisms for the last two decades. It's more obvious and was probably more bloody, but it wasn't exceptional. Just as the occasional execution or massacre by the British was a part of, not a deviation from, the day-to-day repression they carried out.