Before it happened, nobody imagined that the Archduke Ferdinand's murder in Sarajevo would set off World War I. Before the "shot heard round the world" was fired, I doubt 18th-century Concord, Mass., expected to go down in history as the place where the American revolution began. Before last weekend, when the Russian press agency ITAR-TASS declared that the government of Georgia was about to invade Abkhazia, nobody had really thought about Abkhazia at all. As a public service to readers who need a break from the U.S. election campaign, this column is therefore devoted to considering the possibility that Abkhazia could become the starting point of a larger war. If you haven't heard of Abkhazia before, don't worry. It's a pretty safe bet that it's probably not the priority of many people in the White House, and it hasn't even been one of those "Who's the president of Pakistan?" trick questions in the election campaign. On the contrary, Abkhazia ranks right up there with Nagorno-Karabakh, Dagestan, South Ossetia, and all the other forgotten Caucasian cities and statelets that no one wants to think too hard about but where, occasionally, something really awful happens. For the record, Abkhazia is a province of Georgia that declared its independence in 1992. A small war followed, with ethnic cleansing of Georgians from Abkhazia coming after that. There have been some U.N. attempts to make peace, and Georgia has tried offering Abkhazia wide autonomy, but Georgia and Abkhazia mostly maintain an uneasy stalemate, which occasionally turns into an extremely uneasy stalemate. Usually, this happens when an atmosphere of extreme uneasiness is useful to the Russians, who are the Abkhazians' closest military, economic, and political allies and who have a long-term interest in the destabilization of pro-American, pro-Western, pro-NATO Georgia. Thus, when the Russian press agency announces that Georgia is about to invade Abkhazia, it may mean that Georgia really is about to...