I prefer old books to modern punditry.

If you want a primer on what is happening in Georgia, I suggest:

'Eastern Approaches' by Fitzroy MacLean

'The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia' by Peter Hopkirk

(Surprisingly, both are currently available on Amazon.com)

My confidence that the surge would work was based on reading old, out-of-print books by British Officers who succeeded in quelling the Malayan insurgency in the 1950s.

Throw in a little Gibbon and the Histories of al Tabari, and it is not hard to see a lot of the underlying fundamentals of Iraq.
The modern punditry and analysis, and even modern books, are tainted by the current political climate.

Hopkirk's book is a bit 'young,' being published in the early 1990s, but it is distant enough of an analysis to be more reliable than modern punditry and its political positioning.

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