Roundup on Georgia

For the first time in almost a decade, war has come to Europe. Russia is attacking a sovereign nation for the first time since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And for the first time ever that I'm aware of, a head of government declared war while actually at the Olympics, making a mockery of the tradition of the Olympic truce.

Russia is pummeling cities and defenses all over Georgia and driving Georgian forces out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the country's two separatist regions. Georgia has pleaded for a truce, but none seems forthcoming.

Beyond that, not much is clear. Claims and counterclaims are flying fast - over who started the hostilities, over whether or not Russia has invaded Georgia proper, over Russia's stated war aims, over whether Russia has targeted a key pipeline, over what could have been done and what should be done now to prevent Russia from completely dismembering a tiny, democratic U.S. ally on its border.

Debate on all these issues is already intense. A partial roundup:

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has published an appeal for support from the West in today's Wall Street Journal. He concludes, somewhat ominously, that if help isn't forthcoming then the entire region may have to rethink its commitment to Western political ideals and true independence from Russia.

Georgian citizens in and around the fighting are pleading for help from the US and NATO and wondering just why they committed 2,000 troops to the war in Iraq, if not to earn protection from their allies.

Charles King, an expert on the region at Georgetown, lays much of the blame on Georgia itself for what he describes as "a form of calculated self-sacrifice," taken in the hope "that Russia's predictable overreaction would convince the West of exactly the narrative that many commentators have now taken up."

The Guardian has largely accepted claims that Georgia attempted to retake South Ossetia by force, and argued that the fighting has been a strategic defeat for Russia. David Clark, a former UK government adviser, took a different tack in the same pages, arguing that the fighting was the result of long-standing Russian scheming, but also betrayed weak self-esteem of a bully.

Ed Lucas, a long-time critic of Putin's Russia, takes a dim view of things, seeing in the fighting the success of Russia's military and propaganda strategy to regain complete freedom of action in its periphery. He urges the West confront Russia now before it starts to eye bigger prizes, like Ukraine.

Thomas de Waal lays the blame more squarely on Georgia's president.

Robert Kagan sees August 8 as the "official return of history," the return of an active confrontation between democracy and autocracy. The argument is either convenient or prescient, as Kagan has been advancing just this theory of world affairs for a year now.

Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, both Clinton-era State Department officials, see the crisis as an example of a failure of trans-Atlantic unity.

It will be some time before the details of just what is going on become clear. Whatever emerges, though, it seems clear that the fighting is more than the expression of leftover ethnic squabbles, or territorial feuding over some obscure territories. How and whether the US and other nations are able to rein Russia in, and what lessons the other small countries in the region take away, will set the tone and direction of the terms by which the rest of the world relates to Russia for a long time.