[One of the best things about running a blog is that friends and colleagues will often contact me to ask if I will publish an occasional guest contribution. The following comes from the respected veteran journalist, author, and academic Jonathan Sanders, Ph.D., whose expertise on Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union ranks among the best. I’m grateful for this interesting contribution. – Bob Amsterdam] The Olympic Warlet By Jonathan Sanders Little wars – “warlets” – in obscure far-off places teach sharp, if unromantic lessons. The Olympic warlet – the firefight-turned-invasions of the enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that began on 6 August (another intelligence failure by the US military, with satellites looking down and some hundred agents on the ground looking up; either the agents were blind or failed to take the Putin-revived military seriously – this is the biggest blunder of this type since the Americans were asleep at the switch in December 1979 when Brezhnev and Company exercised their wet dreams of warm weather beaches and pretty Afghan maidens) – demonstrates even to the most election-campaign-fueled American patriots the folly of including a place like Georgia in NATO. Ronald Regan would ask a simple question: would you risk NATO-backed thermonuclear war to defend South Ossetia?