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The makers of this week's map want to remind visitors to Beijing of the violent history lurking behind the glitz and glamor of the Olympic Games. Freedom House's Ellen Bork along with the Weekly Standard's design director Philip Chalk and Tiananmen survivor Tian Jian have created this map for Beijing tourists interested in visiting the sites of the June 4, 1989 massacre of the Tiananmen Square protestors. Each number shows the place where where one of the 176 victims were killed or the hospitals to which their bodies were taken.

You can find information on the victims here and read Bork's explanation of the map at the New York Sun's site.

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This is a couple of days old but I'm really surprised that British Conservative Party leader David Cameron hasn't gotten more flack for this idea:

Russia’s elite value their ties to Europe - their shopping and their luxury weekends. We should look at the visa regime for Russian citizens. Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.

First of all, I'd like to hear aspiring prime minister Cameron explain to the owners of Selfridges -- not to mention London club owners looking for someone willing to buy cocktails flecked with flakes of 24-carat edible gold -- why they're being punished for Vladimir Putin's foreign policy. Also, wouldn't it actually help Russia's economy to make jet-setting noviy russkiy spend their hard-earned petrorubles in St. Petersburg instead of Soho?

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The Georgian Times is running a piece today on the history of the Roki Tunnel, which runs beneath the Caucasus mountains connecting South Ossetia and Russia. As one of the only routes connecting North and South Ossetia, the tunnel was critical in Russia's ability to launch its counterattack into Georgia on Aug. 8.

Georgians long resisted the construction of the tunnel during the Soviet period, fearful of an influx of North Ossetians into Georgia, but the project was finally greenlit in the early 1990s by Georgia's first communist party secretary and later president Eduard Shevardnadze. The Georgian Times notes:

Shevardnadze perhaps did not imagine, when signing off the Roki project, what a fatal role this tunnel would play in the history of Georgia."

It's still unclear to me why the Georgian military was unable to block the tunnel during their initial incursion into South Ossetia. President Saakashvili claims that this was part of the plan and troops simply did not reach the tunnel in time. But the Georgian air force has fighter jets and helicopters and it seems possible that they could have attacked the tunnel from the air at the same time, or even before the ground assault on Tskhinvali, perhaps delaying the Russian counterattack long enough to better establish their position. Georgia tried (unsuccessfully) to blow up the tunnel during the civil war in 1991 so it's not like this is a new idea.

Any readers with a military background care to weigh in?

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

There's some interesting Kremlinology (or Moscvology as Blake might have us call it) from Anna Smolchenko in today's Moscow Times. She notes that Dmitry Medvedev's bellicose comments in North Ossetia yesterday -- vowing a "crushing response" to future attacks on Russian citizens and referring to Georgia's leaders as genocidal morons are sharply at odds with the more conciliatory rhetoric he has used in the past. Smolchenko suggests that the president may be getting tough in an effort to reassert his own relevance.

This seems plausible to me. Last Tuesday I noted that it was Medvedev who declared a ceasefire while Vladimir Putin had been the one who effectively started the war. This seemed to be evidence of a good-cop-bad-cop approach from the tandem. But Russia's continued operations in Georgia this past week while Medvedev has repeatedly assured the world that a withdrawal was taking place have only helped confirm what most already suspected: that Medvedev is a glorified PR guy with no power over a state still run by Putin.

Condoleeza Rice seemed to be not-so-subtly hinting at this over the weekend:

The word of the Russian president needs to be upheld by his forces or people are going to begin to wonder if Russia can be trusted."

Members of the foreign press were barred from attending any of the events on Medvedev's trip to the Caucasus which could suggest that the president -- known to read several foreign newspapers every day on the Internet -- isn't happy with how he's being portrayed in the international media.

He might be calculating that if he can't actually influence the policy set by hawks like Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, he might as well just out-hawk them at the podium.

The quote from a senior Russian military commander doesn't really fill me with confidence that the Russian occupation of Georgia is ending any time soon:

I can say for certain when the New Year will come but I cannot give an exact date for the withdrawal of our troops from the conflict area yet," said Col.-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn. "I can only say that we will not be leaving as fast as we came."

Russia seems to be continuing the dismantling of Georgia's miltiary infrastructure even as President Medvedev speaks as if the withdrawal is already happening. In spite of Nogovitsyn's assurances that troops are pulling out of the central Georgian city of Gori, there's no sign that they're leaving.

It's now been almost a week since Medvedev ordered a ceasefire. I'm curious to see how long the Russians can plausibly claim to be withdrawing without any of their troops actually leaving Georgia.

ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/AFP/Getty Images

Negotiators have finally hammered out a deal to base U.S. interceptor missiles in Poland. After a deal was reached to base a radar system in the Czech Republic in July, the Poles were the final holdout for America's controversial missile shield, but the agreement was delayed by the Polish demands for Patriot missiles. According to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, that demand has been met.

This has been in the works for nearly 18 months and was sure to be resolved eventually, but the timing of this announcement makes it hard not to wonder if events in the Caucasus didn't help to move things along. Poland, having seen what can happen to other wayward countries on Russia's periphery, is sure to welcome an American troop presence while the United States, which hasn't done much to help its ally Georgia, gets to demonstrate that it still has friends in the former Eastern bloc.

Russia would appear to have few options for punishing Poland, a member of both the EU and NATO with a far larger military and economy than Georgia, but after last week it would be foolish to underestimate what Vladimir Putin can accomplish with limited military and political resources.

UPDATE: Killer quote from Tusk:

Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later - it is no good when assistance comes to dead people. Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of - knock on wood - any possible conflict."

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President George W. Bush has announced that the U.S. military will be delivering humanitarian aid to Georgia, a move that his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili has described as a "turning point."

The announcement, along with the withdrawal plan that Dmitry Medvedev signed on to this morning, seems like a sign that the war is winding down into the clean-up and recovery phase. Russia's foreign ministry is not thrilled about U.S military involvement but says they're open to "consultations" about how best to deliver aid. (Corrected. See comments.)

The only problem is, Russian troops don't seem in any hurry to leave Georgia. Russian tanks, along with "irregular" volunteers from the North Caucasus, contine to occupy the city of Gori. According to the Russians' laughable explanation, they're sticking around to protect the local population from irregulars, who are stealing cars. This menacing quote from a Russian tank commander doesn't make it sound like he's getting ready to pack up:

It all depends on what Saakashvili is going to say. If he doesn't understand the situation, we'll have to go further. It's only 60 kilometers to Tbilisi."

It's still early to speculate, but it's possible that Russia, in fact, has no intention of leaving Georgia. The longer Ossetian and Abkhazian forces stay within the country proper, the more likely it is that Georgia will be provoked into firing back, giving the Russians a pretext for further military action. So, despite this morning's hopeful signs, Georgia is far from out of the woods yet.

One final observation: If the worst-case scenario does come true, serious questions will be raised over whether any statement by Dmitry Medvedev has any basis in the reality of Russian policy.

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More bad news for Georgia on the war's second front: Rebels from Abkhazia, the country's other breakaway province, have entered Georgia proper and planted a flag in an attempt reclaim what they say is historically Abkhazian territory. The Abkhazians met no resistance and mocked the retreating Georgian troops, saying they had received "American training in running away."

There are also extremely disturbing reports of Russian tanks moving through Georgian villages near the Ossetian border this morning followed by columns of "irregulars" including Ossetians, Chechens, and Cossacks.

The Guardian's Luke Harding reports:

Eyewitnesses say they are looting, killing and burning. These irregulars have killed three people and set fire to villages. They have been taking away young boys and girls."

Saakashvili now seems completely out of options for defending his country's sovereignty or protecting Georgian civilians from the violence. It may not be long until sentiments like this become more common:

Why did [Saakashvili] take on Russia with 10,000 soldiers? Maybe he was thinking somebody would help us. But nobody did help us," Bacho Janashia, a 24-year-old student said. He added: "We hope Saakashvili disappears from Georgia." Why? "Because he's a bastard."

This isn't the first time the world has looked on sympathetically while Georgia was trounced by Russia. Does this sound familiar?

The President of the Georgian Republic has made an appeal to the League [of Nations] and sympathetic reference to his country's efforts was made by M. Paul Boncour in the Assembly. But it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid, and that the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to make any impression on Soviet Russia. -The Times. Sept. 16, 1924

Here's Wikipedia on Georgia's "August Uprising."

VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/Getty Images

The departure of 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq -- the third largest presence after the U.S. and Great Britain -- obviously poses a challenge for what's left of the coalition of the willing. Most of the Georgians were posted to a series of anti-smuggling checkpoints in Wassit Province, near the Iranian border.

While U.S. commanders described Georgia as an "important and valued partner," the locals don't seem to broken up about their departure:

I do not think that the departure of the Georgian soldiers will have an impact on the situation in the province," [Wassit Governor] Latif Hamad said in a telephone interview. "There were always language and poor performance problems. Our security forces can fill any vacuum."

Local Iraqis were happy to see the Georgians leave. They complained that the Georgians, most of who could speak little English or Arabic, were rude and disrespectful.

"They did not try to give us services. Instead, they were a source of annoyance by delaying us at their checkpoints and mocking the simple locals," said Salim Ali, a 45-year-old farmer.

Georgia mistakenly anticipated that its help in Iraq would compel the U.S. to intervene during its time of crisis. I wouldn't be surprised if some other coalition partners started dropping out soon.

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At least 150,000 Georgians took to the streets today to protest Russia's actions and support President Mikheil Saakashvili. The indefatigable president told the excited crowd that Georgia would be pulling out of the Russian-led Commonwealth of Indpendent States and urged other post-Soviet countries to do the same.

Going by anecdotal evidence, Georgians seem to be overwhelmingly behind their government, but I wonder how long this will last. Georgia has most likely lost control of South Ossetia forever and in a few days they may lose Abkhazia as well. When the smoke finally clears, Georgians may start to ask questions about why exactly Saakashvili thought that sending troops into South Ossetia was a good idea, particularly if it turns out to be true that his American allies warned him against it.

Whatever his faults, Saakashvili is certainly no Slobodan Milosevic. But the Serbian example provides a good model of how a country can turn against a nationalist government when that government's actions result in it losing territory and international standing.

Saakashvili narrowly survived a political crisis around the end of last year. Next time he may not be so lucky.

The South Ossetia war may be winding down but fighting continues in Georgia's other breakaway province, Abkhazia. Roughly 3,000 Abkhaz troops attacked Georgian military positions in the disputed Kodori Gorge this morning. The region's president Sergei Bagapsh claims, “We will take the region under complete control in a few days.”

Russia has escalated its "peacekeeping" presence in the region to 9,000 troops in recent days but denies that they took part in this assault though. At this point, they don't really need to. It's hard to imagine the Georgian military launching a major counteroffensive after the Ossetian catastrophe.

That Dmitry Medvedev issued his instructions to the Russian military to pull out of Georgia just before he met with Nicolas Sarkozy for peace negotiations seems significant. Russia ended this war exactly when they wanted to, without waiting to be told.

It was also a nice touch that it was Medvedev who made the anouncement. Remember that it was Vladimir Putin who said "war has started" last Friday. This good-cop-bad-cop approach to world affairs seems quite effective for the tandem.

The war itself was pure Putin tough: a brutal yet measured display of force. Russia certainly demonstrated that its troops could have marched right into Saakashvili's office without the world doing anything about it. But this is not a repeat of the Cold War and Putin is not Leonid Brezhnev. Occupying Georgia is probably more trouble than it's worth when Russia can simply "throw it against the wall" to show it is possible.

When Putin has opposition political leaders jailed or beaten up, it's not because they pose much threat to him -- he and his allies could win any national election fair and square -- but because he wants to destroy the perception that a meaningful opposition even exists.

Georgia never really posed much of a threat to Russian security, but Georgia's government and citizens had the perception that Western support allowed them to determine their own destiny, even if that meant opposing their powerful Northern neighbor. That perception has now been effectively destroyed.

As Andrew Kramer and Ellen Barry's heartbreaking report from Gori makes clear, Georgians feel betrayed and abandoned by their American allies. The Russian media isn't really reporting it that way though:

• Kommersant reports that 2,500 to 3,000 mercenaries from Ukraine, the Baltic states and the South Caucuses are fighting in Georgia under the direct command of U.S. military instructors.
• According to wire service RIA Novosti, U.S military transport planes were being used to fly in Georgian troops from Iraq to join the fighting. Vladimir Putin has also commented on this.
• Izvestia claims (in Russian) that an African-American military instructor was arrested with a group Georgian explosive experts in South Ossetia. (Hat tip: Lawyers, Guns, and Money) There are also some odd reports of "dark-skinned bodies" being found.

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The situation in Georgia is evolving rapidly. Here are some of the latest developments:

• Local authorities are claiming that nearly 1,000 civilians were killed in this morning's military assault. A spokesman for Russia's peacekeeping force in the region says that 10 Russian soldiers have been killed and thirty wounded.
• Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili says that 30 Georgians have been killed by Russian bombing. He also claims that Georgian troops have taken control of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. According to news agencies, fighting between Georgian and Russian forces is ongoing.
• "War has started," says Vladimir Putin. Georgia agrees.
• Georgia will be withdrawing 1,000 troops from Iraq to participate in the fighting.
• Envoys from the EU, United States, and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have been dispatched to negotiate a truce.
• Volunteer fighters from North Ossetia -- officially part of Russia -- are pouring in to help the rebels.
• The Red Cross has called for the opening of a "humanitarian corridor" to allow civilians to evacuate.

Around the blogosphere, Daniel Nexon, Robert Farley, Doug Merril, James Joyner, and Nathan Hodge have all been following this closely.

Watch this space for more.

Here's what State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos had to say about the fast developing conflict in South Ossetia:

We support Georgia's territorial integrity and call for an immediate cease-fire. We urge all parties, including Georgians, South Ossetians and Russians to de-escalate and avoid conflict."

Barack Obama said basically the same thing:

Georgia's territorial integrity must be respected. All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis."

The problem with these statements is that they seem to ignore the fact that it was Georgia that started shooting yesterday, not Russia. There isn't a direct contradiction between supporting Georgia's territorial integrity and demanding an end to the fighting but in the context of this situation it's pretty close.

Not surprisingly, John McCain was more directly critical of Russia:

Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations, withdraw all forces from the sovereign territory of Georgia," McCain told reporters in Iowa. "The U.S should immediately convene an emergency session of the U.N. security council to call on Russia to reverse course."

Of course, there's a strong argument to be made that Russia has been trying to push Georgia into this war, but McCain seems to be either unaware of Mikheil Saakashvili's own role in escalating the conflict or deliberately downplaying it.

There's no doubt that the United States' close relationship with Saakashvili puts it in an awkward spot here and it will be interesting to see what form the American response eventually takes.

Update: Same line from the White House:

I want to reiterate on [President Bush's] behalf that the United States supports Georgia's territorial integrity and we call for an immediate ceasefire," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement in Beijing where Bush was attending the Olympics.

Defying warnings from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, around 1,000 volunteers from Abkhazia, Georgia's other breakaway province are headed to South Ossetia to aid seperatists there against the Georgian military. Abkhazia's foreign minister told Der Spiegel:

We understand very well that we Abkhazians are next in line after South Ossetia. If the situation doesn't stabilize again, then we will have to open a second front.

Abkhazia's tensions with Tblisi have been getting far more media attention than South Ossetia's over the past few months. The status of both territories have been a matter of dispute since the end of bloody civil wars in the early 1990s and both are backed by Russia in their bids for independence.

For some background on the buildup to the conflict, click here, here, here, or here.

VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/Getty Images

So it's war.

Reuters is reporting that Russia has bombed a Georgian airbase near Tblisi, the capital, in retaliation for yesterday's massive military incursion into South Ossetia. Russia has also sent troops into the breakaway region. A senior Georgian military official told the agency, "They have declared war against us."

Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili, a key U.S. ally in the Caucasus, is calling for American aid but I have to assume it's next to impossible that the United States would sent troops into a messy civil war where they would be facing the Russia military. FP author Jon Sawyer's warning is proving prescient.

However this ends, Georgia's bid to join NATO is now effectively dead. In that sense, Russia has already won and the months of ratcheting up the pressure in the breakaway province seem to have paid off.

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Steve Clemons gives the Barack Obama campaign a good thrashing from the left today for the candidate's willingness to accept the resignation of his Muslim outreach coordinator, Mazen Asbahi. The Wall Street Journal reports that Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, resigned because of questions about his ties to an Illinois-based Imam named Jamal Said who has been accused (though not indicted) of fundraising for Hamas. The two served together for a few weeks on the board of an Islamic investment fund back in 2000. Predictable smug outrage has followed on right-wing blogs.

According to the Journal, the tenuous connection between Asbahi and Said was first noted by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, a subscription-only Web site that tracks the international activity of that Islamic party and its supporters. The WSJ says the Report is published by a "Washington think tank," but there doesn't seem to be any author or organizational affiliation mentioned on the site, and a Whois lookup yields no clues.

The Report employs a fairly loose definition of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that includes fairly mainstream organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Amusingly, recent FP contributors Graham Fuller and Marc Lynch are also described as Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers. As Passport readers know, Lynch has indeed met with senior Brotherhood leaders in Cairo, but they hardly see eye to eye. Fuller's supposed ties are of the six-degrees-of-Mahdi Akef variety.

By the standards of this site, you are not only a fellow traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood if you have defended them or recommended dialogue with them, you need only have been loosely associated with people who held those views. By this standard, there probably isn't one prominent Muslim-American in the country that Obama could hire for the campaign. Anyone he could find who has never participated in an event that includes people with sympathies Obama might not agree with is probably not actually influential enough to win him any votes.

Even in a campaign full of trumped-up outrage and guilt by association, the Asbahi affair is pretty absurd. This is roughly the equivalent of Obama throwing Chris Rock under the bus because he once appeared in a movie with the anti-semitic Mel Gibson. If nothing else, it's an indication of how rattled the Obama campaign is by all the Muslim rumors.

Update: ABC's Jake Tapper has much more:

As long as we're playing the guilt by association game, we should note that Karen Hughes, back when she worked for the State Department, spoke before an ISNA conference and was honored with an ISNA dinner, and both former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have met with ISNA leadership.

Also check out the comments on this post for some more investigation into the mysterious Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report website.

Once middle-aged British intellectuals started paying to be waterboarded, it was only a matter of time before the controversial interrogation technique became a tourist attraction. Just next to the famous amusement park in Brooklyn's Coney Island, visitors can now experience the new "Waterboard Thrill Ride":

It looks at first like any other shuttered storefront near the boardwalk: some garish lettering and a cartoonish invitation to a delight or a scam — in this case there’s SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “It don’t Gitmo better!”

If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!

Artist Steve Powers, the installation's creator, intends it to be a provacative political commentary but -- this being Coney Island -- some visitors seem to find it legitimately entertaining.

It's truly disgusting that this freak-show huckster is making a buck by depicting torture for entertainment while the U.S. government is actually practicing these techniques. That's Fox's job!