In the year since the Georgian attack on South Ossetia and the Russian peacekeeping battalion stationed there, the facts of what transpired have been largely established beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet the myths of the conflict persist in the media and, more dangerously, among American policy makers.
In a recent opinion article in the Washington Post, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili repeated his frequent claim that the Russian military operation “was a long-planned invasion aimed at toppling my government and increasing Moscow’s control over our region.” During his July trip to Tbilisi, Vice President Joseph Biden seemed to support Saakashvili’s position by stating that Russia “used a pretext to invade your country.” This is nonsense.
Reports from the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe’s (OSCE) observers on the ground, independent journalists and, most importantly, a number of senior Georgian officials who later broke with the Saakashvili regime, all confirm that it was the Georgian president who personally ordered a tank assault on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali and, specifically, on the Russian peacekeeping unit located there. This conclusion is widely shared by CIA and Pentagon intelligence analysts. It is difficult to explain why Mr. Biden sounded unaware of this while accompanied to Georgia by officials from the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon.
Nor was Saakashvili caught in some kind of a trap. On the contrary, for many months the Russian government warned that independence for Kosovo—changing the borders of Serbia, a sovereign democratic state, against its will—would be a precedent for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Senior Russian officials stated both publicly and privately, in discussions with their U.S. counterparts, that Moscow would not immediately recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states in response to Kosovo’s independence, but that it would be receptive to “requests” from both enclaves for greater integration with Russia. A larger Russian economic and military presence quickly followed.
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