A course set for conflict

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Mixed signals

Saakashvili's behavior and inflammatory rhetoric didn't help matters. Retaking controls of the breakaway regions had always been part of his agenda. He tripled the country's military budget, to $3.2 billion, and added U.S. and Israeli advisors to his government and security forces.

"A number of powerful advisors and structures around President Mikheil Saakashvili appear increasingly convinced a military operation in Abkhazia is feasible and necessary," the International Crisis Group said in a report on South Ossetia in June. "The Georgians have been warned by their Western partners against attempting a military solution," said the Brussels-based advocacy group.

At a conference in the picturesque Croatian port of Dubrovnik over the July 4 weekend, Bruce Jackson and Daniel Fried, the State Department's top European hand, pleaded with the Georgian president to abandon hopes of defeating Russian troops.

"You are not in NATO. . . . If you get into this, you're in it yourself," Jackson recalled Fried telling Saakashvili. "Nobody's coming. There is no cavalry."

Jackson said he was less diplomatic. "I went further than Fried could go, and I pointed out that Georgia hasn't won a war against anybody for 2,000 years," Jackson said. "Let's not kid ourselves. You're not Chechens."

In mid-July, just three weeks before the war erupted, U.S. Marines and Georgian soldiers staged a military exercise at a former Soviet base near Tbilisi. In retrospect, some wonder whether this was a mistake, perhaps giving Georgians the impression that they were more powerful than they were.

"Did somebody misinterpret that?" said one U.S. military official in Washington. "There are, in the intelligence community, [efforts] to say: 'OK, how did this unfold?' "

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Jumping the gun

At 7 p.m. on Aug. 7, Saakashvili appeared on television to order Georgian forces to hold their fire. Then reports came in that Ossetians had overrun at least two Georgian enclaves. The fighting resumed with more ferocity.

According to a senior U.S. official, the State Department's Fried called Saakashvili and tried to convince him that the attacks by South Ossetian irregulars were a Russian trap. But as night fell, reports came in that Russian troops were on the move through the Roki Tunnel between Russia and South Ossetia.

Georgia decided to respond aggressively, quickly taking control of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.