World Politics Review's Judah Grunstein casts a skeptical eye at NATO's 7,000 troops pledge, noting that it will consist largely of European troops are already stationed in the country and will have their deployments extended. A big chunk of them will also come from Georgia,  a non-NATO member with an ulterior motive:

But the rest of the troops mentioned are either already deployed, or coming from a country whose desperate, loose cannon leader is pretty much discredited internationally. From a military perspective, Georgia's contribution is welcome news. But from a political perspective, it represents more that country's desperation to join NATO than a grand victory for Obama's new strategy.

According to the Washington Post, NATO officials are counting on at least 900 troops from Georgia. Grunstein thinks it might be as high as 3,300.

Whatever the numbers, I'm not sure why Mikheil Saakashvili thinks that helping out NATO in Afghanistan will be any more effective at currying international favor than helping out in Iraq. Georgia, at one point, had 2,000 soldiers in Iraq, the third largest contingent after the U.S. and Britain. But NATO membership appears no more likely today than it did three years ago and the U.S. military support Georgia was expecting when Russian tanks rolled in never materialized. No matter how many troops Georgia sends, it's not going to change the fact that NATO has no desire to incur Russian wrath by admitting a recently invaded country coping with two breakaway regions. 

Yes, Georgia receives U.S. miltiary aid and training, but even that is conditional. The U.S. has made it clear that it is training Georgia in counterinsurgency techniques for use in Afghanistan and not "skills that would be useful against a large conventional force like Russia’s." In other words, we'll train to help out with our security priorities, just not yours.

Participating in these missions is generally not as effective a method of gaining U.S. favor as countries think it is. As Polish journalist Adam Michnik noted yesterday,"We are everywhere where the American army fights -- Afghanistan, Iraq -- and thankful America doesn't even remove the visas for Polish people to come to America!"

Countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan have managed to turn their militaries into "rent-an-armies" for U.N. peacekeeping missions in exchange for military aid, but in terms of winning geopolitical concessions, sending thousands of your soldiers into a conflict where you have no particular strategic interest doesn't seem very effective.

NINA SHLAMOVA/AFP/Getty Images

The star of Godfather III star has apparently been enlisted to play the Georgian President in an upcoming film depiction of the August war:

Television pictures showed Garcia holding court in a suit, red tie and a lapel pin bearing the red-and-white Georgian flag in Saakashvili's office in the presidential palace. [See above.]

The plot revolves around an American reporter who gets caught in the crossfire as war engulfs the country, testing his impartiality as a journalist. Papuna Davitaia, a parliament deputy from Saakashvili's ruling United National Movement, is one of the producers on the project.

"Our main concern was to show war as a bad thing," executive producer Michael Flannigan told Georgian television. "We had an opportunity to make a really anti-war film."

Garcia's actually not a bad choice for Saakashvili, though it's pretty doubtful that a film backed by Saakashvili himself and helmed by  the director of "Deep Blue Sea" and "Cliffhanger" is going to accurately capture complexity and moral ambiguity of the August war.

On the other hand, all will be forgiven if they can get Daniel Craig to play Putin. 

IRAKLI GEDENIDZE/AFP/Getty Images

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (2R) cuts a cake symbolizing Georgian-US friendship during his tour at the USS Stout anchored in the Black Sea port of Batumi on July 16, 2009. The US started today joint exercises with Georgia, the first between the two countries since the former Soviet republic's war with giant neighbour Russia.

IRAKLI GEDENIDZE/AFP/Getty Images

Judging by opposition leader Salome Zurabishvil's interview with Der Spiegel, I'd say the chances of Georgia's current political crisis ending with a compromise are pretty minimal:

We were expecting a real dialogue with the president. A genuine dialogue about how we were going to find a way out of this political crisis. Unfortunately he was not prepared for such a talk. He seems to have lost his grip on reality and imagines that 65 percent of the population support him. He says the only crisis in Georgia is the aftermath of the worldwide economic crisis.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And which crisis are you referring to?

Zurabishvili: The political crisis in this country has been going on for about a year and a half. Since 2007, the people have been protesting against Saakashvili's increasingly authoritarian regime. There is no way of expressing this dissatisfaction democratically: elections were manipulated, parliament cannot be moved. Referenda or impeachment proceedings wouldn't stand a chance because in this country all power is concentrated in the hands of one man. And I would call him insane. 

It seems the world won't get to see Georgian vocal group 3G (left) perform their Putin-mocking single "We don't wanna put in" at the Eurovision song contest in Moscow. The politically charged dicso tune was a little too hot for organizers to handle:

The contest's oversight committee said in a statement on the Eurovision web site that the song violated a statute in the contest's charter stating that songs must not bring the contest "into disrepute" and banning "lyrics, speeches [and] gestures of a political or similar nature."

The committee has given Georgia until March 16 to select a new entry or "change the lyrics of the selected song" so that it complies with the rule, the statement said.

I call BS on this. Ireland's Eurovision entry last year, sung by an obscene turkey puppet name Dustin, poked fun at a number of other countires, was purposely designed to mock the contest, and nearly set off a diplomatic incident in Macedonia. And Arab-Israeli singer Mira Awad has angered Palestinian nationalists with a pro-reconciliation Eurovision duet with a Jewish singer.

Whether it's a kitschy song contest or the Olympics, geopolitical rivalries are inevitably part of any international competition. It's very sad to see Eurovision's organizers compromise the integrity of this august institution by bowing to Russia's objections.

Georgia and its pipelines may be central to plans to bypass Russia as Europe's main gas supplier, but the country may soon be partially dependent on Russia for its own power supply.

Georgia has sold a partial management stake in the hydroelectric plant that supplies almost half the country's power to a Russian state-controlled energy firm for $9 million. The plant straddles the border between Georgia-proper and the Russian-occupied territory of Abkhazia. Even though Russia is now paying for electricity that Abkhazians and nearby Russians were already using for free and Georgia will maintain ownership, Georgian opposition leaders smell hypocrisy:

Salome Zurabishvili, leader of the opposition Georgian Way party, sharply criticized the move. “The government is a traitor, which says, on the one hand, that Russia is an occupier, and on the other hand makes deals with the same country.”

Even though this seems like a decent deal for Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili's government had to expect to take a hit from the public. It may be a sign that while top Georgian officials continue to decry the Russian occupation of their territory, in reality they're learning to live with it.

Yet another international organization is poking holes in the Georgian government's official narrative of last August's war. A new Amnesty International report finds that all participants in the conflict--the Georgian and Russian militaries as well as South Ossetian seperatists--failed to protect civilians. The New York Times reports:

Researchers in Tskhinvali concluded that Georgian forces had aimed Grad rockets at military targets — a Russian peacekeeper base, fuel depots and munitions stockpiles, among others — but that the targets were adjacent to civilian areas. The impact of the rockets had a radius of as much as 500 feet, and in some cases missiles struck a third of a mile away from what appeared to be their targets, the report said.

The researchers also found that several thousand civilians were in Tskhinvali the night of the attack, Aug. 7, and that 182 structures in the city were damaged, mostly in the first hours of the war.

Unlike the Georgian attack — described as “a fixed, localized incident that took place over eight hours” — the Russian bombardment that followed was sporadic and lasted for days, Mr. Dalhuisen said. The Georgian authorities commented on their military strategy to Amnesty International’s researchers, but Russian leaders did not.

The report found that Georgian towns, villages and civilians were hit during Russian bombing raids, sometimes “in the apparent absence of nearby military targets,” which would violate international law.

Russian infantry treated civilians in a disciplined fashion, but the Russians allowed South Ossetian forces to loot and set fires in the ethnic Georgian villages north of the separatist capital, the report determined. Amnesty International’s researchers “documented unlawful killings, beatings, threats, arson and looting” by armed South Ossetian groups, the report said.

On balance, the Russians probably come out looking worse, but the report's evenhanded tone will probably irritate the Georgian government, which has sought to portray itself as the innocent victim of Russian agression.

It also follows reports from OSCE monitors and the Times accusing Georgia of firing the first shot in the conflict, and one from Human Rights Watch condemning Georgia's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. Facing increasing internal opposition, the Saakashvili government is disputing the reports and calling for a new international investigation.

Whatever the Georgian government's guilt, the Amnesty report makes clear that its people continue to suffer the consequences.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Once again, UNOSAT's where it's at –- and this time their satellite imagery takes us to a very damaged South Ossetia:

UNOSAT

This map illustrates the structural damage wrought to villages between Kekhvi and Tskhinvali as of August 19, 2008, just three days after Russia signed a ceasefire bringing the Russian-Georgia war over the region to a close. Buildings either completely collapsed or with less than 50 percent of its roof still intact appear in red; those with visible structural damage to a wall or roof are marked in orange.

Interestingly (read: disturbingly), the map notes:

An important preliminary finding of this satellite damage analysis is the observed heavy concentration of damages within clearly defined residential areas."

Maybe that explains those remains of 500 civilians -- and they're still counting.

Russia's campaign to win international recognition for the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia isn't going as well as they may have hoped. So far only Nicaragua, of all places, has signed on. Belarus and Venezuela were both staunch supporters of Russia during the war with Georgia but haven't yet indicated that they intend to recognize the two regions. Moscow will push its case at a meeting of seven former-Soviet republics today in Moscow.

If you're keeping score for the "new cold war" at home, that's Kosovo: 46, South Ossetia and Abkhazia: 2.

When FP spoke with analyst Paul Goble last week about the conflict in Georgia, he made the following interesting point:

I believe that one of the reasons the fighting stopped was not because there weren't people in the defense ministry who thought it should go on for a bit longer, but because in the first two working days of the war, there was a total of some $8 billion net capital outflow from Russia. You're talking about serious consequences for wealthy Russians [...] Polls tell us that for many Russians, the single most important right they acquired after 1991 was the right to travel. If getting a visa becomes more difficult, Russians are going to have a harder time moving about. It's going to be harder to get their children into elite international schools. There's going to be less money around. So, there's probably a constituency, and a pretty large one among an influential group of people, who are going to go to the Russian government and say, "You're hitting us where it matters most: in our pocketbooks." And that's a source of influence that should not be discounted at all.

Today, Andrei Piontkovsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow reads some tea leaves in the Kremlin and warns of the opposite effect: that hardline nationalists could be the ones who gain the upper hand.

Piontkovsky sees a split between "global and national kleptocrats." For now, he puts President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the global camp with Goble's wealthy Russians, and agrees that the two men restrained generals who were eager to roll the tanks into Tbilisi.

But the national kleptocrats, who "seem to believe that they can live without overseas assets, or without educating their children and maintaining residences in the West," present a growing threat, Piontkovsky argues. "They are content to own properties in elite residential areas around Moscow and in Russia, such as Rublyovka, Valday, and Krasnaya Polyana," and care little for the fruits of globalization.

While no one yet knows the national plutocrats' names, I believe that they are new, influential players in or associated with the Kremlin, and that they have now become bold enough to challenge both Putin and Medvedev. Russia's military chiefs, for whom it is psychologically difficult to be ordered by politicians to abruptly end a large-scale and successful military operation, are their natural allies.

I cannot predict who will win this growing confrontation. But even if the global kleptocrats sustain their more "moderate" position on Georgia, theirs could be a Pyrrhic victory. Every day and every hour, by means of their own propaganda, these globally minded kleptocrats, are setting the path to power for the nationalists.

Piontkovsky ends with an ominous premonition:

Putin once said that "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union." The national kleptocrats may soon start calling for its reversal, and they are in an increasingly strong position to do so.

That was quick.

Only three days after Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia, officials from the disputed territory now say they plan to become part of Russia in the near future:

Soon there will be no North or South Ossetia — there will be a united Alania as part of Russia," [Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Tarzan] Kokoiti said, using another name for Ossetia.

"We will live in one united Russian state," he said.

Only this morning, the New York Times ran a feature on Ossetian nationalists imagining a future as the Andorra or Liechtenstein of the Caucasus. Oh well.

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

Last Thursday, Georgia's former president Eduard Shevardnadze told Reuters that "now is not the time" to criticize Mikheil Saakashvili's handling of the South Ossetia war. I guess this week that time has come.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Shevardnadze not only criticizes the man who overthrew him in 2003 for bungling the war, he all but blames him for starting it:

Many people blame the Georgian president. They are wrong in part, but there is also an element to truth to it. He can't be accused of having acted illegally. It was legal to move our forces into [the South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali. But it would have been better not to. When he did decide to go in he should have blocked the Roki Tunnel which the Russians came through. The failure to do so was a tactical mistake. He apparently didn't think things through to the end. He evidently had not expected the Russians to take control of Gori, Poti and Senaki, or perhaps come as far as Tbilisi. If I had been in his shoes, I certainly would not have marched in.

Shevardnadze also attacks Germany and France for blocking Georgia's NATO membership back in April, which he says encouraged Russia to take more aggressive action. But interestingly, he also believes Saakashvili made a mistake in pulling Georgia out of the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States.

Judging from the interview, Shevardnadze seems to believe that it should have been possible to move Georgia toward greater cooperation with the U.S. and Europe while simultaneously improving relations with Russia and peacefully resolving the seperatist conflicts. While Saakashvili certainly deserves much of the criticism that has come his way in recent weeks, it's hard to imagine that any Georgian leader -- and certainly not Shevardnadze -- could have pulled all that off.

Mikheil Saakashvili on why Georgia didn't launch an insurgency against Russia, à la Chechnya:

Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden."

John McCain might be great pals with Mikheil Saakashvili now, but as Politico's Gleen Thrush notes, he once had equally nice things to say about Eduard Shevardnadze, the communist party official-turned-president that Saakashvili led a peaceful revolution to oust in 2003.

McCain told a University of Arizona audience in 1999:

The mindless slaughters being conducted by a Russian military that seeks to reassert itself not only in the former Soviet Union, but also to extend its reach throughout what used to be the former Soviet Union in an attempt to fold back into the Russian empire those countries that have broken away from it, most notably Georgia, which is headed by one the great men in the history of the world, Mr. Shevardnadze.

Last week, McCain told an audience in New Mexico that Georgia used to have "a corrupt government headed by a guy named Shevardnadze, who you may remember from the days of the Cold War."

There weren't any links in the Politico post, so I was curious where Thrush dredged up this apparent flip-flop. Turns out it's highlighted on McCain's own Web site as an example of his "prescient" stance on Georgia. Here's a video.

Perhaps McCain's just another one of those Georgia-loving Americans, no matter who's in charge.