Georgia

Others have commented that wars are the way Americans learn geography. The hyperbole that has sprung up in the last week about a region no one seems to know anything about is truly impressive in that regard. Before the Russian troops started rolling in, any real awareness of Georgia in the general American mind was probably connected with old people eating yogurt, not a vital United States security interest. Perhaps it is this very lack of knowledge that leads so many to think Georgia must be the Sudatenland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia.

One remarkable aspect of this American habit for "instant geography" is the way a region's history begins only when we start paying attention. The current crisis (and history in Georgia) apparently started either when the Georgians asserted their control of "the break-away region of Ossetia", or the Russians responded to that, or maybe, when the Bush administration did (or did not) send the Georgian government confusing signals about how much we'd back them.

Which is why it's refreshing to read an article like this one by Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post.

Actually, the events of the past week in Georgia have little in common with either Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II or Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. They are better understood against the backdrop of the complicated ethnic politics of the Caucasus, a part of the world where historical grudges run deep and oppressed can become oppressors in the bat of an eye.

Unlike most of the armchair generals now posing as experts on the Caucasus, I have actually visited Tskhinvali, a sleepy provincial town in the shadow of the mountains that rise along Russia's southern border. I was there in March 1991, shortly after the city was occupied by Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia's first acts as Georgian president was to cancel the political autonomy that the Stalinist constitution had granted the republic's 90,000-strong Ossetian minority.

After negotiating safe passage with Soviet interior ministry troops who had stationed themselves between the Georgians and the Ossetians, I discovered that the town had been ransacked by Gamsakhurdia's militia. The Georgians had trashed the Ossetian national theater, decapitated the statue of an Ossetian poet and pulled down monuments to Ossetians who had fought with Soviet troops in World War II. The Ossetians were responding in kind, firing on Georgian villages and forcing Georgian residents of Tskhinvali to flee their homes.

It soon became clear to me that the Ossetians viewed Georgians in much the same way that Georgians view Russians: as aggressive bullies bent on taking away their independence. "We are much more worried by Georgian imperialism than Russian imperialism," an Ossetian leader, Gerasim Khugaev, told me. "It is closer to us, and we feel its pressure all the time."

There's more where that came from.

I don't know Dobbs, and I have no idea what biases he may or may not be bringing to his writing. But if John McCain and his friends are suggesting that this conflict is vitally important, we really need know just what the hell it's all about.