As Russia and Georgia stop shooting at each other, some wags have noticed that it seems a lot like a Tom Clancy plot. Actually, it seems a lot like a very specific Tom Clancy plot, Ghost Recon.

Tom Clancy is a dude who loves to say “I called it,” as he did for the September 11 hijackings. So, how does the plot stack up to reality?

First, a little bit of background: South Ossetia and Georgia are populated by two different groups that have long been at odds with each other. The reason one is part of the other is because they were lumped that way by the Soviet Union.

South Ossetia declared independence from Georgia in 1990, and hello civil war. South Ossetia has been de-facto independent since then, and Russia has had peacekeeping forces in the area ever since, with economic aid and Russian citizenship granted. If you want some deeper background, there’s an old War Nerd article on the topic. Imagine Hatfields and McCoys, but longer.

The U.S. likes Georgia because it’s pro-West and has access to Caspian Sea oil. We like it so much we’ve been lobbying to get them into NATO. Russia has responded to the idea of a NATO country on its very border with an invitation for both of us to eat a bag of dicks, which also feeds into the recent war.

So, in Ghost Recon, Russia invades Georgia because the U.S. has been covertly fighting Georgian seperatist rebels. That’s pretty close if you substitute “Georgia” for “U.S.” and “not covertly at all” for “covertly.” Georgia went in, some Russian peacekeepers got shot, and that was all the excuse Russia needed to bring in the tanks.

In the game, the invasion quickly spreads to the rest of Georgia, because the Russians are ultranationalists who want nothing more than to re-establish the borders of the old USSR. In the real world, the war has stopped with Ossetia, even though calling Putin a nationalist who misses the old Soviet Union hardly seems like a stretch.

Here’s where things really come off the rails, though. In the game, the Russian government quickly loses all credibility in the international community, which prompts a full NATO invasion of Moscow itself.

Yeah, wow. Hate to say it, Georgians, but you’re on your own for this one. Start a shooting war with Russia? Us and whose army? Not ours, it’s busy. When Russia says “Yeah, we did it. What are you going to do about it?” we respond with “Not much.“

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