Opinion - Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON -- Watching the Russian invasion of independent Georgia in the Caucasus this week -- and trying to figure out what an intelligent and winning American response should be -- one would do well to look back at Father Bush's response in 1989 to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

WASHINGTON -- In the summer of 1998, I was reporting from Georgia, the Caucasus state now dominating the news as Russian troops pour over and into it. The president, Eduard Shevardnadze, was reminiscing about the most recent Russian assassination attempt against him.

WASHINGTON -- When Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote his first book on the horrors of the Soviet camps in 1962, the excitement that burst forth in Russia and the West came pouring out like a torrent of hope. Virtually every Western analyst not only praised "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" but also saw its big, bear-like, bearded author as the forerunner of profound change in his tortured land.

WASHINGTON -- For at least the span of my lifetime, the exact dates of which shall remain unmarked in my columns, many Americans have struggled in vain, waiting for the time when race in this country would become, at least for the most part, an irrelevant factor in our political life. Progress came, but it plodded along.

WASHINGTON -- As we face the opening of the Beijing Olympics next week and speculate about what this intensely historic event could mean to mankind, two questions come to mind.

WASHINGTON -- Let's put aside the possible comparisons of Barack Obama on his foreign trip -- a true "tour de force," as one of the breathless headlines put it -- to Caesar marching down to Rome. We'll stop ourselves from calling him a modern-day Alexander the Great, Marco Polo or, merely, John F. Kennedy.

BELGRADE, Serbia -- The arrest of the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, charged in the worst massacre since World War II, was an unlikely yet radical transformation in a country that had appeared to be headed on a path toward virulent nationalism and isolation." -- The New York Times, July 23, 2008

WASHINGTON -- When Bronislaw Geremek was tragically killed in a car crash in Poland in mid-July, most Americans did not recognize his name. Geremek, who? Bronislaw, what? Oh yes, we do know where Poland is -- more or less.