Fanning the flames in Georgia: an American defense of Georgia could risk nuclear war, yet the Bush administration seems determined to turn this brush fire into a Cuban Missile Crisis-like stare-down.(WORLD)(Viewpoint essay)

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Occupying the territory between the Black and Caspian Seas, the rugged Caucasus Mountains, where Europe and Asia meet, is a rough neighborhood. Home to dozens of different languages belonging to three entirely separate stocks--the Indo-European, Altaic, and Caucasian proper--and two major world religions, Christianity and Islam, the Caucasus are both a cultural crossroads and a patchwork of religious and ethnic animosities, some of them stretching back centuries. In an area where Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Dagestanis, Ossetians, Kalmyks, Russians, Kurds, Turks, and many other ethnicities and tribes jockey for control of land ...