Bush and his policymakers should have recognized that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was unstable, out of control and too incompetent to be trusted with handling a border incident, let alone a real war.
Instead, they funneled modern Black Hawk helicopters, counter-insurgency experts, armored vehicles and personnel carriers to him and encouraged him to think he could roll up the Russian-backed secessionist enclave of South Ossetia.
It didn't help that Saakashvili, like so many would-be mini-tyrants was a blustering bully who openly boasted in advance what he was going to do to the South Ossetians.
But once Saakashvili responded to South Ossetia artillery fire with a heavy bombardment of his own against its capital Tskhinvali, the Russian army responded in force. And then it was a different story.
The Russians rolled the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in record time, and then they kept rolling, cutting the tiny former Soviet republic of 4.4 million people in the Caucasus in half and effectively isolating its capital Tbilisi.
The U.S. government was taken completely by surprise. Bush continued to relax watching the Olympic Games in Beijing for a full four days as the crisis unfolded. Even when he returned to Washington, he – typically – only stayed there for two days before departing to enjoy some more leisure time at his home in Crawford, Texas. The Georgians were left hung out to dry.
Saakashvili predictably blamed the Western World for "betraying" Georgia, but in truth, he had no one to blame but himself.
The major nations of the European Union had already made quite clear at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in March that they refused to extend the guarantee of military intervention and full security protection offered by Article 5 of the 1949 Washington Treaty to Georgia, even though Bush was pressing hard to get Georgia into the alliance.
Currently, the United States is engaged in an ominous naval build up that appears to be directed against Iran, with even France and Britain contributing supporting forces. And it remains a moot point whether Bush will be more willing to rein in Israel from taking rash action against Iran – or anyone else – than he was to restrain Saakashvili.
The U.S. president's entire track record over the past seven and a half years suggests, unfortunately, that despite all his assurances to the contrary to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and others that when the crucial decision-making time comes, Bush will fold yet again and let the Israelis do what they want.
The failure of Israel's mini-war against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite party of God in southern Lebanon in July 2006 should have taught Bush the lesson that he had to keep America's militaristic and potentially aggressive little client states on a much tighter rein, whether in the Middle East, the Caucasus or anywhere else. He clearly failed to learn it in dealing with Saakashvili and the people of Georgia are now paying the price.
But if Bush makes the same mistake yet again, in either attacking Iran, or allowing Israel to, when he cannot gauge what the scale of retaliatory action will be, the price the United States may pay could be vastly higher. And the nations of the Middle East unfortunately will not be immune form those consequences either.