That’s a title I have to say that I didn’t expect to be writing about with any seriousness. Yet here we are, with Russia and Georgia facing off over South Ossetia:

The president of the separatist region, nestled in the Caucasus mountains, said 1,400 people had been killed. Moscow said its troops were responding to a Georgian assault to take back the region.

This is a big deal, and the US is rather involved with things there. US-Georgia relations are generally pretty good, and Georgia has been seeking NATO membership for a while (something that – were it in place now – conceivably require a US military response to the Russian movements, today).  Not sure where the best news source for this is yet, but if I find one, I’ll post it here.

Update: Understandably, Georgia’s taking 1,000 of its troops out of Iraq and bringing them home.  The discomfitting bit?  The US is the one doing the transportation.  Wired’s (excellent) Danger Room blog gives us some general background on the Georgia-US military relationship:

Since 2002, the U.S. military has been providing Georgia with a serious amount of military assistance, beginning with the Georgia Train and Equip Program in 2002. I first visited Georgia’s Krtsanisi training range in fall of 2002, when the Georgian military was still little more of a militia, with some of the troops wearing sneakers and surplus Soviet uniforms.

[ . . . ]

Officially, SSOP was supposed to prepare Georgians for service in Iraq. But Georgian trainees I spoke to in 2006 at the Krtsanisi training range saw things a bit differently. A female sergeant told me: “This training is incredibly important for us, because we want to take back Georgia’s lost territories.”

There are no innocent actors here, and the US public should keep its eye on this (even if its President is busy playing games in China).