I know that liberals should take pains not to find fault on both sides, and rather to focus on Russian aggression, but there's a fine article in The New York Times examining Georgia's claims about the South Ossetia War, and finding many of those claims faulty.
According to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.This has been a key point of dispute; Georgia has claimed that Russian armored columns were invading in support of South Ossetian bombardment of Georgian villages. It turns out that neither the bombardment nor the movement of the column can be confirmed by third party observers. This comes on the heels of reports that Israeli-made cluster munitions were utilized by Georgia during the war, and that those munitions killed South Ossetian civilians. The domestic and international media in Georgia has also operated under tighter controls since the end of the war.
The lesson for folks like David Greenberg who were critical of liberals for displaying insufficient zeal in support of Georgia should be this: There's a reason that many liberals were wary about declaring Russia the aggressor in the South Ossetia War, and there were reasons that we were reluctant to lionize Saakashvili. The most important reasons are that we recognize complexity, and don't feel the need reduce international events to crude Cold War stereotypes. Another reason for caution was that many liberals had a basic knowledge of the Caucasus region, of its politics, and its history, and that this knowledge made us skeptical of both Russian and Georgian claims. Greenberg calls this a neglect of liberal ideals; I'd suggest that paying attention to the world has always been a liberal ideal.
--Robert Farley
