I knew that line was running through my head from somewhere. Thanks to my good friend rdansky and Google, I remembered where.

“Eastern Europe, 2008

The world teeters on the brink of war. Radical ultranationalists have seized power in Moscow - their goal, the reestablishment of the old Soviet empire. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan - one by onne the nearby independent republics slip back into the Russian orbit. Russian tanks sit in the Caucasus Mountains and the Baltic forests, poised to strike to the south and east. The world hold its breath, and waits.”

(Hat tip to Stephen Chambers who also remembered.)

Rich, Stephen and I aren’t the only ones who remembered, even among the odd forum posters around the Net.

When Ghost Recon came out, I was pretty heavily enraptured. I was always a sucker for miltech and GR was really one of the first FPS to catch on that there’s a good, hardcore bunch of gamers interested in fighting down in the mud and blood with realistic movement, graphics and tactics. Following on the heels of Ubi’s Rainbow Six and borrowing some of the squad-command architecture that made R6 great but moving to more wide open environments, I was pretty much dead on in it’s target demographic. It started a love of the mil-tac shooter genre that persists, even though I’m lousy at them when they turn into run-and-gun fests. I’ll never forget the times I ended up moving slow through a cluster of village buildings, just waiting for someone to jump out to take us and knowing I had nothing to depend on but the skill of my squad-mates if they leapt from my flanks.

Right now in the South Ossetian, that exact scenario is playing out with the addition of tanks, artillery, and ruthless Russian efficency, except instead of the respawn timer there’s a lot of widows and orphans.

There are a lot of issues at play in the Georgia / Russia conflict. Most of them are unpleasant, some of them paint both sides in a bad light, and it’s just generally a mess, as most Russian politics are. It’s worth noting that the Georgians provide the third largest force contingent in Iraq after the US and the UK. Not any of the Western European countries, but Georgia. The fledgling democracy. For that and a number of other powerful reasons, the conflict currently burning is a very important one to the US, to the West in general, and to Eastern European soverignity in specific.

The mainstream media is doing a spotty job at best at pointing out why this is. Do yourself a favour and go digging and find out what’s at stake.