Notes to NATO

In recent days Georgia has forwarded recorded mobile telephone taps of border guards at the Russia to South Ossetia checkpoint. In the last week this information has been passed to government officials, including those of the United States. Intelligence officials in the United States, and no doubt other countries and organisations, are conducting an analysis into the essential question of “who fired the first shot?” in the Georgia versus Russia war.

The Georgian president is now passing around the telephone taps that supposedly show that the Georgian assault on the South Ossetian capital was a response to a Russian invasion. It is quite remarkable that Saakashvili (the Georgian president) did not make mention of this earlier. It is even more amazing that this crucial information - that was within hourse of being received (by the intelligence community) passed on to senior members of the Georgian government, and upon which a decision was to go to war in response to an invasion – happened to be lost for several weeks in a pile of old intelligence reports.

The final icing on the cake of this amazing saga is that Georgia’s official position until recently was that the idiotic attempt to take back South Ossetia by force was a pre-emptive strike in response to the inevitable Russian invasion. Quite profoundly, the inevitable had actually already happened. It is just the Saakashvili and is intelligent friends lost the record of invasion, and then forgot that the invasion actually happened.