A cautionary note:

Almost immediately, officials on both sides claimed wild and improbable death tolls. Russian officials accused Georgia’s government of committing “genocide,” saying 2,000 Ossetians had been killed. Georgian officials spoke of summary executions and announced that “most” ethnic Georgians in South Ossetia had been killed or put in detention camps. It will probably take weeks to sort out who died and how. Witnesses and nongovernmental organizations say that although widespread looting and some detentions occurred, far fewer civilians died than originally reported. In fact, on both sides it has been hard to find people with firsthand knowledge of deaths in a war that sparked the biggest crisis in Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States since the Soviet Union collapsed. … Russian officials adjusted their figures last week to 197 dead — 133 Ossetians and 64 Russian soldiers. Georgia now says 400 Georgians were killed, half of them in the military — with 150 to 180 soldiers still unaccounted for.

Now, discounting the lies of combatants doesn’t necessarily tell us what policies to pursue, not in Georgia any more than during WWI, when we were taken in by lies about the Kaiser’s soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies. But prudent foreign policy-making needs to include a healthy skepticism about news from a war front.