Madam, - Very shortly now, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin will announce that a democratic majority of the populations of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia wish to be part of the old empire and that therefore, with immediate effect, both these regions are once again part of Russia.
President Bush will have problems with this idea but his closest ally, the United Kingdom, will be well able to explain the subtleties of this little spin, having used it themselves here and there. Georgia will just have to put up with its loss of territory.
Estonia, Latvia and other former Soviet possessions: watch out!
- Yours, etc,
VINCENT MacCARTHY, Cloncat, Fordstown, Co Meath.
Madam, - It seems that in a more and more desperate attempt to excuse Russian aggression against Georgia, some of your letter-writers are scraping ever harder at the bottom of the barrel.
Frank Schnittger (August 19th) tells us that - shock, horror! - Georgia has a paid lobbyist in the US. And that lobbyist is close to presidential candidate John McCain, thereby accounting for McCain's strong position on Georgia.
Well, it seems that in having a paid lobbyist in Washington, Georgian deviousness knows no bounds. What Mr Schnittger doesn't tell us, of course, is why a relatively impoverished country like Georgia feels the need to have a paid lobbyist in the US in the first place or why it feels the need to join Nato. Perhaps the television pictures of Russian troops bombing and looting Georgia and terrorising its citizens might answer that question.
As for Mr McCain, he has a long and honourable record of standing by smaller nations in eastern Europe. During the Bosnian war, when Russia openly flouted the UN arms embargo on former Yugoslavia to arm Serbia and let it slaughter Bosnia's largely defenceless Muslims, Senator McCain was foremost in calling for the lifting of the embargo so that Bosnia could defend itself. And he did this without prompting from a lobbyist.
I get the feeling that some of those justifying Russia's aggression still haven't recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. Perhaps that is why, once events move east of the Danube, their moral compass goes haywire.
Most East Europeans, by contrast, having endured decades of Communist dictatorship, overthrew their repressive governments and have repeatedly shown that they prefer Western-style democracy to the despotism of Vladimir Putin.
- Yours, etc,
SEAN STEELE, Kilfenora Road, Kimmage, Dublin 12.
Madam, - President George W. Bush says that "bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century". Behold an American President in whom there is no irony.
- Yours, etc,
Senator DAVID NORRIS, Seanad Éireann, Dublin 2.
Madam, - I was a small child when the Russians crushed the freedom of the people of Hungary in 1956 and a teenager in 1968 when Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, imposing Kremlin rule on the freedom-loving people of that country.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of us were naïve enough to believe that all of that had changed. Events in Georgia prove how wrong we were. Certainly Georgia was wrong to attack south Ossetia, but absolutely nothing justifies the savage Russian response.
This is not just about Russia defending its citizens in south Ossetia. Could it be an attempt to entrench its influence in the Caucasus and control the oil supply?
What can the West do? Well, for a start, Russia should be thrown out of the G8 and it should have no part in the World Trade Organisation.
Of course, you'll notice that President Bush is not quite so ready to deal with Russia and Putin as he was with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. And Saddam never posed a threat to world peace.
- Yours, etc,
ANTHONY REDMOND, North Great George's Street, Dublin 1.