GERGIEV SAYS RUSSIAN ARMY SAVED HUNDREDS OF LIVES IN SOUTH OSSETIA

Valery Gergiev, the noted classical music conductor, is a native of South Ossetia, and today, according to BBC Radio News, he conducted a concert in memoriam for all of the Ossetians killed in the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia.

Gergiev also spoke to the BBC and said if it were not for the Russian army coming to the rescue, hundreds if not thousands more Ossetians would have been killed by Georgian missiles and bombs.

Steve Erlanger reports in today's The New York Times on the contrast between the official U.S. position which makes Russia into the perpetrator and Georgia into the victim and the more nuanced European view that sees this whole conflict the result of an impetuous and not too smart Georgian president Saakashvili.

Writes Erlanger:

"The United States — stung by the Russian move against a Washington protégé, Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili— has talked in cold war terms, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice comparing the Russian move to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But many European leaders believe that Mr. Saakashvili acted rashly when he sent his troops to take over the autonomous ethnic enclave of South Ossetia, bringing down much of the destruction upon his own head.

"“On one side you have a bear, and on the other, a little ‘roquet,’ ” said one senior French official, using the French word for a yapping little dog. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the Georgian crisis publicly, allowed that Mr. Saakashvili may have fallen into a carefully prepared Russian trap. “But when you’re a chief of state, you have to know about the reality of forces,” he said. “This was an incredible misjudgment by Saakashvili.”"

And it was a disastrous attack against South Ossetia that brought the Russian army to the rescue. What else would anyone expect when South Ossetia was populated with so many Russians? Would Bush or Cheney or Rice do any different if Americans in Tijuana were being bombed and shelled by Mexico which wanted to re-exert control over a largely American colony there?

Bush's harsh reaction to Moscow is just another example of the United States trying to bully the rest of the world in order to protect a Bush crony and protege by the name of Saakashvili.