The argument you make comparing Russia's invasion of Georgia to the U.S. invasion of Iraq might hold on many grounds, but it doesn't as a matter of international law and precedent. First of all, Iraq was not a sovereign nation in 2003, and Georgia is now (Russia recognized the national sovereignty of the break-away republics from the USSR). Iraq didn't have sovereignty in 2003 because of the first Gulf War. That war was justified by Iraq's unprovoked invasion of Kuwait. Afterward, no-fly zones and weapons inspections were imposed on Iraq (the idea that Salon.com has floated the Bush was proposing sending a U.N. painted drone over Iraq to provoke Saddam into shooting it down would have been another legal justification for invasion other then Saddam building WMDs or denying inspections), abridging its sovereignty.

Furthermore, as mentioned already in an earlier letter, the legal precedent was set by Madeleine Albright (Clinton was involved in the impeachment process) in deciding to invade a sovereign state, Yugoslavia (by the way, if you want to talk about confusion about international law, look also at how the Europeans and then Americans handled recognizing the break-away republics in that conflict). The precedent was set in 1994 for invading a sovereign nation, and that was the framework that Putin followed, although it seems like his support of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was a charade of the Russians funding and arming groups so that intervention was justified, and to keep the dispute alive to make Georgia toxic to the EU and NATO. While, rhetorically, Putin has more to draw on by citing Bush instead of Clinton as his inspiration, in terms of international law, the Clinton Administration was the first democratically elected administration to break from the post-WWII (or maybe post Westphalia) order. Bush might have broken U.S. law, or at least violated the principals of a democracy in lying and manipulating evidence to gain public support for the Iraq war, but he seems to have been within international law. The Yugoslavian intervention, however, clearly was not.

This is not to align moral judgments with international law. The Yugoslavian intervention seems to have been for the best, while Iraq is nebulous at this point after years of disastrous handling. The Russian invasion is cynical and terrible and I would support strong actions to push the Russians back, not only for Georgia, but for Western credibility in containing Russia in the Baltic and other parts of Eastern and Central Europe. Obviously, I do not want to see a war or crisis between the U.S. or NATO and Russia though. So while the author's moral intuition is fairly on, his legal reasoning is not.

Since this thread has begun spiraling in circles around the issue of Democrats and Abortion, I'd like to get a Catholic response to a question (maybe from the Catholics who are putting Black Liberation Theology under the microscope).

I haven't read Aristotle myself, or Thomas Aquinas, but since someone posted the Pope's quote on abortion from a distinctly Aquinian(?) point-of-view, I think it's fair game to question - and I've been exposed to their ideas at least second-hand. The church's view on Abortion revolves around a demonstrably falsified doctrine. Not to impute Aquinas or Aristotle, how could they really have known? And I think that it's fair to judge philosophy, like art, on aesthetic as well as 'truthfulness' grounds. However, Aristotle believed that the world was made up of elements, and things made of these elements strive for their telos - natural end - to reunite with what they fundamentally are (example: rocks are made of Earth, and thus fall towards the Earth as their natural end). I'm sorry, it's interesting speculation, and has a beauty to it, but it's not true. Since then Newton discovered gravity, Scientists have discovered that water, earth, and fire are of the same atomic/fundamental materials and so on.

So, if the underlying doctrine has been disproven, what place does a Catholic or the pope have in basing their position on abortion on this doctrine (a fetus's end is a full-grown human being, and thus is defined as a full grown human being, never mind that a fertilized egg doesn't always make it to birth or adulthood 'naturally' without talking about abortion - so is it's natural end as one-third or one-quarter of a human being, making abortion one-third or one-quarter murder?). Maybe the doctrine of Natural Law based on Aristotlean philosophy can be reconciled with the last eight hundred years of thought and discovery (I think the church has at least admitted that the earth is not, in fact the center of the universe or flat, right?), or maybe it can be updated and pruned, but I don't see any effort in that direction. How does a Catholic reconcile his current dogma with current knowledge, when one of the principles of his belief, on which he bases his dogma (especially in relation to abortion) is simply false? I'd like to at least hope that Aristotle and Aquinas would be able to understand that their speculations were wrong, and that they're formidable minds would try to reconcile what people knew to be try with how they viewed the world, but the real question is 'What does a contemporary Catholic do?'