Putin has been licking his wounds for decades. Russia is ready to reclaim superpower status, with energy control as a key part of the agenda.

Russia wants to put the US on notice that its goal of increasing regional influence and boxing in Russia won't work. I imagine Russia wants the US to drop its missile-shield plan, in exchange for "playing nice" for another few years.

However, if the US doesn't back down gracefully and Russia continues to press Georgia, the US will almost certainly press back somewhere, probably a limited attack on Iran's nuke facilities and air-defense network. Unlike Vietnam, though, where both US and Russian actions had long logistics tails, the Russians are playing much closer to home this time around, and they are in growth mode while the US is struggling. They can needle the US without much effort, while the US will be hard-pressed to increase the force level in the gulf region.

Certainly there is an opportunity for this conflict to increase regional instability, and any of the hot locales could potentially involve a few mega-barrels of oil in production.

I think someone like Boone Pickens is who we need in the drivers seat

Boone Pickens is no Jack Kennedy....

The games played with tanks and troops are the obvious ones. It's the "brainy" ones played with money, influence, favoritism, oppression, trade deals, and so forth that are less visible but more significant long term, and which set the stage for the "bloody" ones.

The danger for Russia in going down the path of supplying anti tank and anti aircraft weapons to insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan is that many of those weapons would go back to Russia with Chechyn volunteers.
And if America was bloodied by Russian supplied weapons then they may also up the ante by supplying arms to the Chechyns and others. The Russians could only cut off Europes gas as payback and the yanks wouldn't care (payback for lack of support by Europe).
Hopefully common sense prevails on all sides.