The Guardian has an interesting analysis, if just because it avoids the common wisdom available on a Google News search that somehow the Georgians shelling a city full of women and children is Russian aggression.
Their analysis is that this was a well planned offensive, and that they hoped to catch the Russians off balance, with Putin in Beijing for the Olympics, and it now appears that they were wrong:
Observers had little doubt that the operation to take South Ossetia back under Georgian control bore the hallmarks of a planned military offensive.((emphasis mine)
It was not the result of a ceasefire that had broken down the night before - it was more a fulfilment of the promise the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, had made to recapture lost national territory, and with it a measure of nationalist pride.
It appears that the US has been aggressively supporting and training the Georgian army for some time, and this may have contributed to Saakashvili's belief that he could get away with it.
I'm wondering if this isn't a screw up, and that Bush and His Evil Minions™, particularly Cheney, might have been looking for something like this just before the election, for electoral benefit, but their boy in Tbilisi pulled the trigger too early.
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