I find this comment compelling. It was in the NYT this morning.

2.
August 12th, 2008 7:53 am
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The author of this article misses quite a few historical points. Georgia became a "country" only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For hundreds of years it had been voluntarily absorbed in the Christian Russian Empire in order to find protection from the Moslem Ottomans in the south.Ossetians, much like Kosovars formerly in Serbia, are of a different ethnicity; they are not Georgians.Mikhail Saakashvili is the last person the US should have supported as President of Georgia. He is an ambitious, ruthless, young "brat", a graduate of Columbia Law School, who exploited the corrupt state of affairs in his country and his connections with conservative circles of the US Administration to gain political power. He is viewed by Moscow as a stooge of America and the Putin parallelism between Saddam Hussein and Saakashvili is quite convincing to his Russian audience.To disturb the relations with Russia in order to gain influence in the sub Caucasian region is sheer political opportunism. The current Administration has already committed major mistakes in Iran and Afghanistan, and possibly in Pakistan. Let us not repeat them in Georgia. The utterance of the President that Russia’s response to Georgia’s first aggression is “disproportionate” implies that the Russians had a good reason to react the way they did.From a moral standpoint the Ossetians have at least as many rights as the Kosovars to demand their independence from an oppressive and cunning Georgian regime. Saakashvili is another Milosevic and we should let the Russians clean up the dirt.
— Reviewer, New York