The conflict in South Ossetia has produced a cloud of rhetoric that seems to have grown in inverse proportion to the intensity of fighting on the ground. Once the outcome became clear - a crushing Russian military victory - Cold War imagery flooded the Western press. Far more than the status of a tiny mountainous enclave in the South Caucasus was said to be at stake: not only was Georgia's territorial integrity imperilled by Russian tyranny, but the future of democracy was under threat. In the Washington Post of 11 August, Robert Kagan asserted that the conflict will be seen as 'a turning point no less significant' than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given this 'much bigger drama', 'the details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important.'

LRB 11 September 2008 | PDF Download