President George Bush of the United States of America, President Dmitry Medvedev and Premier Vladimir Putin of Russia spend a lot of time these days posturing about Georgia. This is not the more familiar state with its capital in Atlanta, but rather the small, triangular-shaped republic nestled in the Caucasus Mountains along the eastern shore of the Black Sea. With a rugged geographical land area about one and one-half times the size of Cuba, and a population approaching six million, Georgia has been much in the headlines in Moscow and Washington. The short mini-war during the Olympic Games in Beijing last August allowed Russian troops rapidly to destroy the Georgian army. By the end of August the two very small breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had declared their independence and become de facto Russian protectorates.

It was a small war far away, but it revealed a lot about the hidden long-term cost of making war. Georgia is not just a local Caucasian issue. It is of enormous strategic and political importance to Russia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the USA. Russia used the occasion to get back at Georgia for suspected support of Chechnya and Ukraine as well as thumb its nose at NATO and the USA for their controversial attempt to expand their military alliances and encircle Russia. The big loser was obviously Georgia that badly miscalculated in starting a war expecting immediate material assistance from NATO and the USA. None emerged from the fray politically untarnished.

To begin to understand the situation, three initial considerations are in order. The first is that Georgia, similar to all those artificially created states of Central Europe, especially in the Balkans and the Caucasus, contains a number of discrete nationalities cohabiting in very close quarters. Geographical territory therefore is continually being disputed by various enclave populations that often cross administrative boundaries as in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The second consideration is that Stalin was born in Gori, the second largest city of Georgia, and therefore Russians, regardless of what they think of Stalin, consider Georgia to be an integral part of their history and their domain. The declared independence of Georgia and its decision to opt for membership in NATO remain painful for many Russians. Moreover, some Russian leaders suspect Georgia of having helped the irredentist Chechens in their unsuccessful declaration of independence in the 1990s.

The third observation is that the two disputed areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have never really considered themselves to be part of Georgia and indeed, only a small minority of Georgians lives in either province. On the other hand, a substantial population of Russians reside there. To make matters worse, Russia issued passports to a large proportion of the population of South Ossetia last year. Both regions tried unsuccessfully to declare their independence in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Georgia versus South Ossetia dispute has been festering on the brink of war for years.

The aggressive attempt by Georgia to subdue opposition in both provinces is without political merit. It was a shrewd calculation by the multilingual, Anglophile Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili to boost his sagging popularity at home and to force NATO to come to his assistance - although Georgia is not yet formally a part of NATO.
Saakashvili remains George Bush's darling - largely because he speaks perfect English and is adept at flattery.
The Georgian timing for war was very bad. Neither the USA nor NATO did more than issue threats to Russia as it went in and demolished the Georgian army in South Ossetia, and occupied large portions of Georgia itself. Russia has a petroleum and gas pipeline running through Georgia and considers it to be fully within its geographical sphere of influence.

Having unilaterally (almost) invaded Iraq, the USA had no moral capital to oppose meaningfully other interventions. President Bush and his secretary of state have been loudly deploring the Russian activity, but there is nothing that they can do about it beyond sending in "humanitarian supplies" to Georgia and promising to help with the rebuilding of the country. NATO and the USA are simply stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, unlike the USA and Britain, Russia is flush with cash. Putin is determined to restore the military grandeur of Russia and it seems there is nothing anyone can do about that. To Putin and his colleagues, people in glass houses are in no position to throw stones.

To the despair of Georgia, the USA, the European Community, NATO and the secretary general of the United Nations, President Medvedev unilaterally recognised the independence status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on August 26. The rationale was the same that the United States had made on countless occasions when it intervened in Latin American and Caribbean states. They were merely sending the military to secure US lives and property. What serves the American goose also serves the Russian gander.

The manifest impotence of the USA and the European Community in the Georgian affair demonstrates the severe military and economic haemorrhage of the United States since the Viet Nam war of the 1960s. The price of war far exceeds the lives lost and damaged, or the physical destruction of property. It insidiously saps the economic viability of participating states. Nowhere is this better borne out than in the case of the United States that is fighting a global war on terror with money borrowed from China and Japan while mortgaging future US generations and eroding its moral stature. The present calamitous economic condition of the United States has its roots in thoughtless wars fought in far-away places for fanciful reasons. Those who most enthusiastically engage in wars often fail to calculate the long-term hidden price. For most modern disputes war represents neither an intelligent nor an efficacious response.

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