OLYMPICS 08: Russia steals early lead as China twirls

No sooner had China launched its Olympics with a thunder of fireworks and flurry of synchronised hand-waving, than the swarthy Russians steel their thunder with this terrifying piece of sabre-rattling against Georgia. Mr Putin has declared: ‘war has started’. He is in Beijing as we speak, every inch the steely leader. Perhaps he will bare his muscles for the games themselves – he is something of a judo master, after all.

The human tragedy aside, Russia is set to host the Winter Olympic Games in 2014 – in a place called Sochi, billed as ‘Gateway To The Future’. Sochi is a coastal resort near Russia’s southern border, which Georgia lies just below. What kind of future, exactly?

Those in the know, now: Swings and roundabouts in Iran and Russia

It must be wonderful to be one of the very few Iranians who actually knows what the hell is going on in their country’s nuclear programme. Imagine the fun they have pointing fingers and sniggering at the endless western speculation over whether their nation is enriching uranium ‘for military purposes’ rather than the innocent civilian use which they claim. Up until recently, we all believed they were guilty as hell. Then the American National Intelligence Estimate proclaimed that the programme everyone was worried about (not the research, note) actually stopped in 2003. The Israelis immediately said it was nonsense, and a firestorm of comment erupted on both sides of the American bipartite system, fanned by the realisation that one of the people currently campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire will soon be in a position to press the button and nuke the whole place.

The tricky point about intelligence is that it is rarely solid fact, and should not be taken as such. It is an indicator, a best guess.

But in an age of endless information, it is incredible to think that something is happening somewhere that it’s not possible to get information about instantly. Perhaps a Google search for +iran +”nuclear weapons” +yes/no would do the trick? No? How shocking. The problem with so much information is that very little of it means very much at all, and in the places where you need it most, it is often entirely absent.

Still, this could be regarded as a matter of context; rather like freedom of speech in Russia. These days, it’s the nationalists, the extreme right-wingers who get the airtime. Back in the unsteady days of Boris Yeltsin’s booze-soaked administration, those famous days of glasnost and vodka, it was the liberals who dictated the terms. Garry Kasparov probably had quite a lucrative domestic media career back then. Now, it’s the nationalists – although one wonders how many of them died when the liberals were in charge.