Who's in firstsky?

Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog has a post by Max Boot addressing evidence that Russia may have started the war with Georgia.

Georgia has rolled out a powerful new weapon in the info-war it has been waging with Russia ever since Russian troops invaded its soil. In the words of the New York Times: "Georgia has released intercepted telephone calls purporting to show that part of a Russian armored regiment crossed into the separatist enclave of South Ossetia nearly a full day before Georgia's attack on the capital, Tskhinvali, late on Aug. 7." Those calls occurred among Ossetian border guards, and they would seem to buttress Georgia's assertion that it was not the aggressor in this conflict.

Many questions remain, and the tidbits quoted in the Times are hardly conclusive evidence of who fired the first shots, but they do serve to establish an important point: that, because of these intercepts, Georgian officials genuinely were convinced on August 7th that Russian troops were already invading their country, and they had to respond. Perhaps that impression was mistaken, but it certainly seems that the Georgians acted in good faith. Were that we could say the same for the Russians who are piling one lie on top of another, accusing Georgia of every sin under the sun, to include unsubstantiated charges of genocide.