The army that likes to go to Iraq

Davit Mukeria, a lanky 22-year-old sergeant in smart American-made fatigues, has just come home from Iraq. He is part of the Georgian Army, perhaps the only fighting force in the Coalition of the Willing that is begging to send more troops to Iraq, rather than attempting to extricate itself from the quagmire, and is volunteering to go into Afghanistan too.

Along with his 2,000-strong brigade, Mukeria returned earlier this year from a seven-month tour of duty in Iraq, where he picked up his clipped English from speaking to American soldiers.

Why are he and his colleagues so eager to return? The answer lies in the local conflict with Russia over the breakaway region of Abkhazia, where in recent months the outbreak of war has seemed close.

When Mikhail Saakashvili came to power in the Rose Revolution of

2003, he promised to bury Georgia's Soviet legacy and turn the country of five million people into a modern democratic state. To do this, he wanted Western support for Georgian entry into the EU and Nato, and assurances from the West that they would support his country in any armed conflict with Russia over Abkhazia.

He never quite got those assurances, but his buddy George W Bush (who now has a street in Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, named after him) pumped huge amounts of financial aid into Georgia to help it modernise its military. Today Nato membership, though stalled due to Russian objections, seems only a matter of time.

Last year, Georgian troop numbers in Iraq were raised from 850 to 2,000, and its relatively tame peace-keeping operations were upgraded to more dangerous combat missions intercepting