Georgia: There's more than meets the eye ...

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i7wB5Uxre-eHOI61jE5CZyRbV5QgD92EHPAG0

US has political, economic stake in far-flung spat

By ANNE GEARAN – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — There's more than meets the eye to the frantic U.S. efforts Friday to talk Russia and U.S. ally Georgia out of war over an obscure mountain tract most Americans have never heard of.

A look at the map and your gas credit card bill shows why.

South Ossetia is claimed by Georgia, the former Soviet republic that cast its lot with the United States and the West to the eternal irritation of Moscow. The breakaway province has been under Russia's sway for years. snip

"For all those reasons and the fact that Georgia has demonstrated that it is a close ally, we cannot simply sit by and say `so be it, what does South Ossetia mean to us?'" said Janusz Bugajski, director of the new European democracies project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Georgia as a whole means quite a lot."

The pipeline that crosses Georgia can pump slightly more than 1 million barrels of crude oil per day, or more than 1 percent of the world's daily crude output. The 1,100-mile pipeline carries oil from Azerbaijan's Caspian Sea fields, estimated to hold the world's third-largest reserves. Its potential vulnerability was already in the spotlight after it was sabotaged this week, apparently by Kurdish separatists.

Most of the oil is bound for Western Europe, where gas prices are even higher than the $4 and more a gallon that U.S. consumers are now paying. With only so much oil to go around, what the pipeline carries affects prices elsewhere. The United States also hopes it will be a model for other development projects that could have a more direct effect on the U.S. market.

A really good book about Russia and the oil is Dispatches from the Former Evil Empire: Richard Threlkeld. It came out in 2000 but is still relevant and illuminating.