Old Blue,
why did they approach Ossetia as if it were a smaller nation and they were at war?
Read “Why Can’t We Live Together?”
In the case of South Ossetia, a self-proclaimed independent country that is, in fact, neither independent nor a country, “nowhere” is probably the best way to describe where it’s gone. It’s perhaps the closest you can get today to experiencing the old Soviet Union, as well as a good place to get the flavor of a good old-fashioned, Cold-War-style proxy war between the United States and Russia. South Ossetia broke away from Georgia after a chaotic 18-month war that killed 1,000 (of a population of 60,000) between 1990 and 1992. Today, South Ossetia is propped up by Russia: Moscow pays government salaries and provides the bulk of the peacekeeping forces.
South Ossetia now appears to be a police state. Close to half the men I see on the street are police or military, and many men not in uniform openly wear pistols.
There are very few shops and little activity on the streets, even for a town of 40,000—but especially for the capital of a would-be independent republic. The biggest industry besides the security apparatus, which is almost all funded from Moscow, is subsistence farming.
South Ossetia was maintained by the Russians since 1992 as a salient into Georgia. South Ossetia reaches down like a finger that effectively cuts Georgia in half.
