It took only three weeks in August, but here we are in the foothills of a new new cold war, bouncing son of the "new cold war" fired up by Carter and Brzezinski and the US defense industry in the late 1970s and grandson of the old cold war with the Soviet Union launched in the Truman era.

It has shaped up along familiar lines. In the first crucial hours the US press tactfully passed over the fact that it was John McCain's pal Mikheil Saakashvili who set the ball rolling with Georgia's initial lethal bombardment in South Ossetia. Amid howls about Russian imperialism, McCain hopes to notch ahead of Obama in the polls by phoning the nutty Saakashvili and sending his wife, Cindy, on a supportive excursion to Tbilisi. I'm sure Cindy is thrilled to be among those hot Georgians and away from John and his towering, violent rages. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rushes to Warsaw for a photo op with Polish leaders, signing a deal to install missile defense early-warning radar systems.

Vladimir Putin duly plays his allotted role by denouncing the scheduled deployment of these systems in Poland and the Czech Republic as unacceptable threats to Russian security. Last year Putin declared in a press conference that "once the missile defense system is put in place it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the United States. It will be an integral part of the US nuclear capability.... And, for the first time in history--and I want to emphasize this--there will be elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security.... Of course, we have to respond to that."

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