George Hewitt doesn't like the way:
"the torrent of media commentary on the Georgia-Russia war has been characterised by near-obsessive geopolitical calculation, which [...] tends by default to view Georgia's "lost" territories (if they are viewed at all) as nothing more than inconsiderate and irritating pawns on a global chessboard."
Georgia has its own "near abroad", that happen to be within its UN-defined borders; Russia has Georgia in its "near abroad" ... Remember Mandelbrot's ginerbread man: whatever the scale you examined it at, you'd get those repeating patterns. Fractals of nationalism. And what about the non-Ossetian minorities in South Ossetia? Where will they go, as one of our commenters asked.
Surely there is a pattern here that we can see should be avoided: to treat the other, be it ethny, nation, or however you care to define the outsider, as a means to your political end? Shouldn't alarm bells from the Balkans be ringing in NATO's ears?
George Hewitt provides the historical background and the detail that we need to read to understand---to really sympathetically understand--- that when we take the short-cut of geopolitics, we allow ourselves to think of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as mere pawns in a new cold war, then we have already ruled out the possibility of a humane solution.
