U.S. Has Political, Economic Stake in Farflung Spat.

There's more than meets the eye to the frantic U.S. efforts Friday to talk Russia and U.S. ally Georgia out of war over an obscure mountain tract most Americans have never heard of.

A look at the map and your gas credit card bill shows why.

"For all those reasons and the fact that Georgia has demonstrated that it is a close ally, we cannot simply sit by and say `so be it, what does South Ossetia mean to us?'" said Janusz Bugajski, director of the new European democracies project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Georgia as a whole means quite a lot."

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