Saakashvili’s splendid little war in early August was accompanied by a lot of propaganda. But it still it was obvious to most people that Saakashvili started the war with an artillery barrage against civilians and Russian peacekeepers. Only some 12-15 hours later Russian troops from outside South Ossetia arrived to help their besieged comrades. After two days the outcome was obvious. Georgian troops were beaten and the Russian Federation forces had won the fight.
NATO analysis, the OECD observers and ‘western’ intelligence agencies confirm this view of the events. The Georgians attacked in mass first, then the Russian Federation moved troops and beat them.
But on August 26 a new Georgian version crept up. The Georgian government started to assert that regular Russian troops rushed into South Ossetia before the Georgians attacked.
We have now undisputable judgement on who is correct here.
Michel J. Totton, a right wing will-write-whatever-for-money
‘journalist’ was flown to Georgia and sat down with Saakashvili
official media adviser. On August 26 he then published The Truth About Russia in Georgia asserting, as he was payed to do:
Virtually
everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly
provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into
the breakaway district of South Ossetia.
…
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor
on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6
when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages
with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides
in 1994. At
the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing
down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the
Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia.
This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South
Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Totten quotes Saakashvili’s media adviser:
"That
evening, the 7th, the president gets information that a large Russian
column is on the move. Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles
emerging from the Roki tunnel [into Georgia from Russia]. Then a little
bit later, somebody else sees them. That’s three confirmations. It was
time to act."
There are 34,600 Google links to Totten’s piece, mostly from rightwing U.S. sites who swallowed that story hook, line and sinker.
But somehow that was not enough to convince the relevant people and
the public attention was moving on. Last week the Georgian
government made new attempt to establish a false history by using a more prestigious propaganda organ than Totten.
On Tuesday the New York Times headlined: Georgia Offers Fresh Evidence on War’s Start:
A
new front has opened between Georgia and Russia, now over which side
was the aggressor whose military activities early last month ignited
the lopsided five-day war. At issue is new intelligence, inconclusive
on its own, that nonetheless paints a more complicated picture of the
critical last hours before war broke out.
..
Georgia claims that its main evidence — two of several calls secretly recorded by its intelligence service on Aug. 7 and 8 — shows
that Russian tanks and fighting vehicles were already passing through
the Roki Tunnel linking Russia to South Ossetia before dawn on Aug. 7.
…
Vano
Merabishvili, Georgia’s minister of interior, said he was told of the
intercepts by Georgian intelligence within hours of their being
recorded. The information, he said, was relayed to Mr. Saakashvili, who saw them as a sign of a Russian invasion.
Pressed as to why more than a month passed before the conversations
came to light, Mr. Merabishvili said the file with the recordings was
lost during the war when the surveillance team moved operations from Tbilisi, the capital, to the central city of Gori. Georgian intelligence officers later sifted through 6,000 files to retrieve copies, he said.
There
are now some tapes of alleged phone calls of dubious origin and the NYT
seems to believe the story. But the last quoted graph throws up a
serious follow up question the NYT did not ask:
Why would Georgia move its
surveillance operation, that ‘lost’ the recordings to find them a month
later, in the middle of the war from the safe capitol Tbilisi to the city of Gori
which was near the front and a day later under Russian control? Beats me.
Neither the account dictated to Totten, nor the new ‘tape’ story the NYT published seem believable to me. But that is just this leftwing blogger’s opinion. But some unfortunately relevant people seem to to support my take.
Yesterday U.S. Secretary of State Rice revealed the official U.S. administration version of the start of the Georgian war in a speech to the German Marshall Fund (the same speech she asserts that Russia is on the way to ‘international irrelevance‘):
On August 7th, following repeated violations of the ceasefire in South Ossetia, including the shelling of Georgian villages, the Georgian government launched a major military operation into Tskhinvali and other areas of the separatist region. Regrettably, several Russian peacekeepers were killed in the fighting.
These events were troubling. But the situation deteriorated further
when Russia’s leaders violated Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial
integrity – and launched a full scale invasion across an
internationally-recognized border.
Here we have the official version from the U.S. Secretary of State:
- The Georgians attacked.
- Further, the Russian Federation responded.
As reality is now even acknowledged by the Bush administration isn’t time for Totten, the NYT and other propaganda organs to give
up on the issue?