Totten on Georgia (cont.)

Michael Totten continues his travels in the Caucasus and reports on what really happened there.

TBILISI, GEORGIA – 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. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.

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.

Read the whole thing here.

This rips away the facade behind which the craven regimes of Old Europe have been cowering ever since Putin's troops dismembered Georgia. "Georgia Started It" Medvedev said, and the Western European former powers desperately grasped that excuse for backing away from the conflict. Well, it was a lie then and a lie now. The simple fact is that the EU and NATO, as currently led, pose absolutely no deterrence to Russian imperialism and there's no point in pretending otherwise.