ORAC,
If that's what the vast majority of South Ossetians want, and if they don't want anything to do with Georgia - what's the problem?
As to all the heart string tugging reports of atrocities and ethnic cleansing, yes, of course it's deplorable, but it's absolutely certain that it's gone on on BOTH sides. The whole reason that the Ossetian's don't want anything to do with Saakashvili's Georgia is that independent Georgia has been nationalist and discriminatory from its foundation.
Under Stalin, Ossetia was part of the Georgian SSR, but was an autonomous oblast answerable to Moscow, not Tbilisi.
When Georgia seceded from the USSR, the Georgian majority stripped the Ossetians of their autonomy and tried to deny them their identity. The first leader of an independent Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, loudly and energetically pursued a policy of "Georgia for the Georgians" - which has only been continued by Saakashvili. Sitting hard on the Abkhaz and Ossetians is populist stuff among the ethnic Georgians, and Saakashvili has been eager to prove his nationalist credentials.
And that's why he invaded South Ossetia.
George Hewitt, a professor of Circassian languages at London University, cites the colorful and well-traveled Bechhofer in an illuminating essay that lays out the grave error underlying American policy in the region:
"In the hope of avoiding a proliferation of an unpredictable number of small states, the international community in its collective wisdom decreed that it would recognize only the USSR's constituent union-republics and would, thus, not give any encouragement to the yearning for self-determination that characterized some ethnic minorities living in regions endowed with only lower level autonomy according to the Soviet administrative system (such as the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia and the Autonomous Region of South Ossetia, both lower-status entities within the union-republic of Soviet Georgia). It was a huge irony that, in adopting this stance, the West was effectively enshrining the divisions created for his fiefdom by none other than the Soviet dictator Iosep Besarionis-dze Dzhughashvili, a Georgian known to the wider world as Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin."
Aside from memorializing Stalin's policy of imprisoning ethnic minorities within larger administrative entities, refusing to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states allows the U.S. and the European community to maintain the fiction of Russian "expansionism." According to Washington, the Russians invaded "Georgia"; Saakashvili's invasion of South Ossetia doesn't qualify as aggression, since how can you invade your own country? South Ossetia and Abkhazia are part of Georgia, you see. Just like a small mammal is part of the anaconda that swallowed it whole.