If you missed Michael Totten’s latest post, The Truth About Russia in Georgia, you simply don’t know what really happened in Georgia.  I certainly had it all wrong until I read his latest, ever indispensable, dispatch.  Even Totten himself had the whole situation backwards until he got there and spoke with Patrick Worms, who has been hired by the Georgian government as a media advisor.  In attendance at Totten’s meeting with Worms was highly regarded regional expert Thomas Goltz, who confirmed Worms’ depiction of the events that led to war.

To believe that Mikheil Saakashvili started the war is to have been played for a fool by the misinformation of the Russians.

Totten writes:

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.

You have to read the whole thing, complete with pictures and interviews with wounded Georgians.

Then you can compare Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s op-ed in the Financial Times with that of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s.

Medvedev writes:

Seeing the warning signs, we persistently tried to persuade the Georgians to sign an agreement on the non-use of force with the Ossetians and Abkhazians. Mr Saakashvili refused. On the night of August 7-8 we found out why.

Only a madman could have taken such a gamble. Did he believe Russia would stand idly by as he launched an all-out assault on the sleeping city of Tskhinvali, murdering hundreds of peaceful civilians, most of them Russian citizens? Did he believe Russia would stand by as his “peacekeeping” troops fired on Russian comrades with whom they were supposed to be preventing trouble in South Ossetia?

While Saakashvili writes:

On Wednesday on this page, Mr Medvedev asserted that Georgia attacked South Ossetia. In fact, our forces entered the conflict zone after Russia rolled its tanks on to our soil, passing through the Roki tunnel into South Ossetia, Georgia. Mr Medvedev also claimed Russia had no designs on our territory. Why then did it bomb and occupy Georgian cities such as Gori? Why does it continue to occupy our strategic port of Poti?

Thanks to the invaluable work of Michael Totten, we can now more clearly see through Medvedev’s (read: Putin’s) sinister fables.  We need to do more to support Saakashvili and the Georgians!