The West's Side Story: an Analysis of how Russia was Blamed for Georgia's Invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

When I first heard the news, I tried to make sense of it. Why would Russia just invade Georgia out of the blue? Georgia is energy rich, but a the contest of petrobucks between Russia and Georgia, it's Megarubles to millikopeks, far in Russia's favor. And just as the Russian Army had overwhelmed Georgia to the point where a belicose President Saakashvili and his security detail were literally jumping at shadows, Medvedev offered his Southern neighbor terms for a cease fire.

Until this week, I had only heard one side of the story - the West's side. The story of how this conflict started was slow to ooze out. On the BBC Radio World Service's World Have Your Say, Chloe Tilly and Co. dedicated a progamme on Friday, August 8 (On Air: Can Anyone Stand up to Russia?) to blaming the entire event on Russia. Tilly didn't mention one word in the blog accompanying the radio programme about Georgia's aggression toward Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Nonetheless, she did indulge a National Enquirer-worthy narrative about Russian-backed gas supply disruptions and political assassinations.

It wasn't until Tuesday, August 12 that The Los Angeles Times dedicated an entire story to Saakashvili's role in the conflict. Marjorie Miller and Geraldine Baum broke a story which was not, by that time, news to anyone with a brain: "Brash Georgian President May have Gambled and Lost" (print title), finally revealed Saakashvili's plot to invade the breakaway republics while the world's eyes were on Beijing. Later that same day (August 13, Russia/Georgia time) beside French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a soft-spoken Medvedev made public his terms for a cease fire. Russia Today reported that President Sarkozy stated that Russia had acted appropriately under the circumstances. A humiliated Saakashvili accepted the terms, but defiantly vowed that "one day Georgia would beat Russia."

Not letting the facts get in the way of politics, the U.S. President and even the Presidential candidates weighed in against Russia, calling their defense of Russian nationals in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as " . . . a brutal escalation" (Bush), "Moscow's violent path of aggression" (McCain) and just plain "aggressive" (Obama). And indeed, Russia is aggressive and was clearly ready for trouble the moment Georgia moved to invade the breakaway republics. They didn't spend six months building up to it like George Herbert Walker Bush did in Desert Storm in 1991, nor did they use it as a distraction from a sex scandal as Bill Clinton did in 1998, nor did they make false claims of WMDs like George Walker Bush did to invade Iraq in 2002. They simply secured the borders of the republics who asked them for help, sacking a military base in Gori, not destroying a civilian airport, as John McCain has claimed That's called strategy, and as with the naval blockade the Russians employed, it wins wars and gets soldiers home to their families. Bush, McCain and Obama may consider taking note of this.

So to answer Chloe Tilly's question, after eight years of usurpations of our civil liberties under the guise of "security" and outright lies by the Bush Administration, not to mention complicity to these high crimes by the UK and the Western press in general (including the BBC), why on earth would we concern ourselves with Russia? Don't we in the West have enough of our own despots to contend with?