One minute you�re looking for South Ossetia on a map; the next everyone�s talking about nuclear confrontation. The escalation of the conflict in the �Caucasus into a kind of post-modern Cold War has been breathtaking.

One minute you're looking for South Ossetia on a map; the next everyone's talking about nuclear confrontation. The escalation of the conflict in the Caucasus into a kind of post-modern Cold War has been breathtaking. But great international conflicts have a habit of starting in "far-away places of which we know nothing": Sarajevo, Poland, Pearl Harbour and now South Ossetia.

Fortunately, our diplomatic mechanisms are rather better at handling international crises than they were in 1914. But that doesn't mean we are out of the woods yet in the Caucasus. It's a sobering thought that, if George W Bush had had his way and Georgia had been a member of Nato, we would now be at war with Russia.

Nato is an alliance which, in theory at least, commits its signatories to react collectively to a military threat to any one of its members. Would we really have been prepared to lay waste to Europe in support of the unstable and unreliable Georgian leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, who launched a cowardly, brutal assault on the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali under the cover of the opening night of the Olympic Games? I hope not, but we can't be sure. With someone like George W Bush supposedly leading the "free world", we can't be sure of anything, except that it will be a mess.

The war in South Ossetia has been a huge error of judgment by the west, and further confirmation of the imponderable stupidity of the Bush administration. It was a gamble that should never have been made, on a conflict nobody wanted, in the interests of a political leader who has no right to our respect. David Cameron will regret his hot-headed dash to Tblisi to be photographed with Saakashvili once it becomes widely known what actually happened in South Ossetia, where the Georgians used Grad missiles against apartment blocks and hospitals.

Now, I know we are supposed to see South Ossetia as a brutal land grab by the Russian Bear, crushing gallant little Georgia under the Moscow boot, etc. The western media has largely accepted the line put out by Washington that we have seen an attempted annexation of a sovereign nation by an imperialist superpower, in the manner of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. But, as always in war, truth is the first casualty.

The Caucasian war was actually launched by Georgia on August 7 in an attempt to crush the separatist movement of South Ossetia. While there was provocation on both sides, this was an act of bloody madness. It was like England launching a war against Scotland for wanting to leave the UK. I'm not saying Russia did not have an interest in supporting a breakaway - it had been handing out Russian passports to Ossetians - or that Putin wasn't playing politics in the region. But that did not justify an all-out military attack by Georgia. The west - by which, essentially, we mean America - massively miscalculated in Georgia, supplying military hardware and expertise to Saakashvili without ensuring he would behave responsibly. The Georgian leader thought he could force the Americans to intervene militarily in support of his attempt to crush Ossetian nationalism. It did not, of course. Not even Mr Bush is stupid enough to launch a land war in the Caucasus. There is no evidence that the Russians plan to annex South Ossetia, still less to invade Georgia with a view to forcing it into the Russian federation. The Russian military have been in no hurry to withdraw, but the evidence is clear that they are now preparing to do so. They don't have the will or the means to occupy a country such as Georgia anyway.

Not only has Russia now restored its military self-confidence and credibility; it has exposed the west's weakness and confusion, already evident in Iraq. But what is much worse is that America has handed the moral high ground to someone who certainly doesn't deserve it: the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin. This authoritarian hardman, who has suppressed free speech in Russia and manipulated its democratic system to ensure his continued rule, can now stand as a champion of the rights of the oppressed people of Ossetia; as protector of the weak against military aggression.

Putin has played his hand very astutely, limiting his military action to destroying Georgian forces' positions around South Ossetia, agreeing to a ceasefire and abiding by it, and now gradually pulling the Russian military out of greater Georgia. Of course there will be reprisals, communal violence and stories of atrocities both by South Ossetians and Georgians. But eventually the west will have to recognise, when we see the pictures of the devastation in Tskhinvali (you can see them already on the internet), that Russia had - as the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said - very little alternative but to intervene in South Ossetia.

Putin can, with some legitimacy, compare his "humanitarian" intervention in Georgia with that of the west in Kosovo. And the truth is that his call for South Ossetians to be allowed self-determination like the former Yugoslavian province is the only defensible one in the Caucasian context. The only solution to the confrontation is for the people of South Ossetia to be consulted and allowed to choose their own destiny, under the inalienable right of all peoples to self-determination. What must not happen is for the west, led by fools in the White House, to compound this misjudgment by seeking to crush the independence movement in South Ossetia.

Yet, by promising to defend the territorial integrity of Georgia, we are coming dangerously close to doing precisely that. We have no right to tell the South Ossetians which country they are to live in. After the bloody behaviour of Georgian troops in Tskhinvali, it would be unthinkable to force the South Ossetians to bend to the will of Tbilisi and remain part of Georgia.

But perhaps the greatest mistake of all by the west was, as President Bush might put it, "misunderestimating" Putin and the Russians. Calling Russia "Saudi Arabia with trees" was more revealing of the state of American diplomatic skill than of Russia. Could you have imagined John F Kennedy indulging in name-calling? Further, placing missiles in Poland and arming Saakashvili were acts of provocation no country could have ignored. Imagine if Russia had placed "defensive" missiles in Mexico or sent arms to Cuba?

Well: it did, of course, back in 1962, when Russia was the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev was arming Castro. The American response then, quite rightly, was to demand the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from its sphere of influence. The roles are reversed today, and we have Bush rather than Khrushchev gambling with world security. But I don't find that a great consolation. The world nearly went to nuclear war over Cuba. Let's hope that we can stop history repeating itself.