There's a whole world out there, Part Three

The very first peace thing I ever organized was a showing of some short antiwar films. One was a cartoon called "The Hat." It featured two soldiers patrolling opposite sides of a border marked only by a dotted line on the ground. They chat amiably - until one of them accidentally drops his hat and it falls on the other side of the border. When he goes to pick it up, the other guard stops him, saying he can't cross the border - it's not allowed. The first protests that it's just his hat, it's right there, he can just reach and pick it up, but the other is adamant. The first becomes angry, things escalate to pointed guns, and as I'm sure you all realize, head right on up to war. (I can't remember the ending, but I have a vague image of a devastated countryside with the hat still sitting on the ground where it fell - until a breeze comes up and blows it back across the border.)

I also remember reading an historical analysis of the origins of World War I which concluded that in at least a certain sense, the war wasn't anyone's fault. Everyone felt either that they were the victims, not the aggressors, or that they got dragged in due to prior commitments they had made in overlapping alliances.

The point, of course, is that given the right conditions, wars can appear as if by spontaneous generation and contrary to the preferences of the parties involved.

On wooded hillsides where Georgian and separatist troops eye each other through the sights of their guns, the smallest spark could set off a war.

Last week the detention of four Georgian soldiers in the breakaway South Ossetia region quickly escalated into a crisis. Georgia threatened an attack on the Russian-backed separatists and in response Moscow sent fighter jets into Georgian airspace "to cool hot heads in Tbilisi". ...

"It's like somebody said: a couple of guys with guns could start a war in these places if they were intent on doing so," said Svante Cornell, an expert on Georgia at the Institute for Security and Development Policy, a Stockholm-based think tank.

Of course, in the modern age no such conflict remains completely local, and tensions are increased by the involvement of both Russia and the US, competing for influence in Georgia, which has the only oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area that do not pass through Russia. The government is generally pro-Western while the separatists look to Russia.

On the ground in [the breakaway regions of] South Ossetia and Abkhazia, huge amounts of weaponry, deep-seated mistrust, unclear chains of command and the lack of any clear front line combine to create a tinderbox. ...

Weapons are everywhere, and not just in the hands of formal security forces. ...

[In addition to the separatists, i]rregular armed groups that fought on the Georgian side in the 1990s war, known under names such as the Forest Brothers and White Legions, have become active again since the start of this year, some observers say.

South Ossetia is even more volatile. It is an untidy patchwork of Georgian and separatist enclaves with shifting boundaries and often just a few metres from each other. ...

"With the dispute between Georgia and Russia in a new, dangerously confrontational phase, the risk of war in the South Caucasus is growing," the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said in a report this year. "A localised provocation or an accident could cut across the calculations of all sides."

The best way to avoid a war - assuming you really want to - is to refuse to respond to provocations, to refuse to overreact to incidents, to refuse to escalate - to, to take it to the far end, let the other fella pick up his damn hat. But doing that can require rejecting the "we can't look weak" argument, can require setting aside the ego of a nation (or a movement). And that is all too rare. Something else I remember reading years ago was the statement that "faced with the choice between humiliation and war, nations have shown a depressingly persistent preference for the latter." Let's all hope that's not the way in this case.