Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has escalated US rhetoric against Russia. On Thursday, Rice said the West should stand up to what she called Moscow’s “bullying.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Russia’s intimidation of its sovereign neighbors, its use of oil and gas as a political weapon, its unilateral suspension of the CFE Treaty, its threat to target peaceful nations with nuclear weapons, its arms sales to states and groups that threaten international security, and its persecution — and worse — of Russian journalists and dissidents and others. The picture emerging from this pattern of behavior is that of a Russia increasingly authoritarian at home and aggressive abroad.”

Rice’s comments were her harshest to date since Russian troops invaded Georgia after Georgia attacked the breakaway province of South Ossetia. It’s widely speculated the Bush administration helped encourage the Georgian attack, which ended up backfiring for the Georgian government. The White House has been widely ridiculed over its protests of Russia’s response to the attack. Rice was questioned on accusations of Bush administration hypocrisy in light of its own invasion of Iraq.

Rice: “If you look at an Iraq that will not seek weapons of mass destruction like the Saddam Hussein regime, that will live in peace and security with its neighbors and that will give its own people a chance for democratic governance, I don’t think that that bears any resemblance to invading a small democratic neighbor whose only crime apparently was that it wished to be a part of the emerging transatlantic world.”

There were other differences: the Russia-Georgia conflict led to several hundred deaths; the US invasion of Iraq has led to the deaths of anywhere between hundreds of thousands to more than one million Iraqis.