In my quest to understand this new explosion of war in the world I went to my Russian friend at work.  He closed his office door and asked if I wanted the long explanation or the short one.  Long, of course.  About an hour later I had a better idea of the conflict, at least from the perspective of a Russian.  His take on the conflict goes something like this: Russia and Georgia have traditionally been friends, Georgia is viewed as a small country with it’s own unique ethnicities (20 of them, at least) and as a beautiful resort state (think Aspen).  After the fall of the USSR Georgia had a few provenences in the 1990s that declared independence (again, lots of distinct cultures exist).  One of these places was South Ossetia.  After awhile Russia took this country in.  Georgia wanted to join the NATO gang, but NATO said, “Uhmm… no… because you don’t have all your states under control.”  So, Georgia hatched a plan to pretend to go about peacefully getting its stuff back in line, but then actually attacked South Ossetia… it’s own citizens that it was trying to get back!  It’d be like if North Dakota joined Canada and then we bombed North Dakota to get them back.  Russia was pissed when Georgia bombed the little state under it’s wings, so it came back with force.  The take-away here is that Saakashvili (Georgian president) did something stupid and then got pounded by Putin.  War sucks.  The War Nerd has an explanation that my Russian friend claims is more accurate than main stream media… even if the War Nerd considers war to be poetic:

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-south-ossetia-the-war-of-my-dreams/