The Guardian editors falsely remark:
Something shattered when the Georgian artillery opened up with a massive barrage on Tskhinvali on August 7 (Colonel Arsen Tsukhishvili, chief of staff of the Artillery Brigade said with pride that 300 of his gun barrels fired at the enemy simultaneously). What broke was not only the columns of Russian tanks the Georgian artillery was aiming at.
As Joshua Foust notes, these are ex-post-facto justifications:
Saakashvili continues to use gullible journalists to push the lie
that he advanced in South Ossetia to head off a column of Russian tanks
bearing down on Tskhinvali. The complaint about the tanks did not show
up in any interviews with Saakashvili or any of his officials until,
near as I can tell, Mr. Worms told Mr. Totten about it—now that meme is cropping up in many interviews with Georgian officials.I would guess, if Russia actually was moving tanks through the Roki
tunnel into South Ossetia, Georgia would have been complaining about it
in the hour before they launched their cease-fire offensive into the
breakaway region. Or they would have raised it at the emergency UNSC
meeting on August 7th/8th. Or it would have been mentioned at all
before August 25—perhaps in one of Saakashvili’s many op-eds in Western papers.
It is really funny how this works in the ‘western’ media.
Meanwhile some circles are building up an alternative to Saakashvili. Nino Burjanadze was a member of the Georgian parliament since 1995 with then president Eduard Shevardnadze’s party. She later joined Saakashvili in the U.S. managed rose revolution. In April she split with Saakashvili and last month she left the parliament and opened her own think-tank, the ‘Foundation for Democracy and Development‘ in Tbilisi. The U.S. and the Russian ambassadors took part in the inauguration.
When the British foreign minister went to Tbilisi on August 21, he had an hour long meeting with her. Yesterday she met with Joe Biden in Denver.
It is not that she is much different from a policy standpoint than Saakashvili. Her father’s business money brought her into politics and it is alleged that he was a big beneficent of corruption under Shevardnadze. But Burjanadze can be expected to run a ‘western’ course without rocking the boat too much and without unnecessarily angering the bear.
A few month from now the Guardian editors will damn Saakashvili and laud Burjanadze into the Georgian presidency.