From wiki---look it up yourself--the facts are facts.
There were not voting on reunification with Russia.
Please someone slap the panic out of these nutters so they can settle down and think calmly and rationally.
Situation-grave
First shot fired? Russia(though it doesn't much matter at this point)
Georgia, an ally-Yes, perfect, uh, no.
Primary objective-Western control of pipeline. US access to pipeline. And, if it means the integrity of Georgia, so be it.
Yeah, nutters, I suppose it was the Georgian towns surrouding Tskhinvali shelling there own homes.
Whenever someone starts telling us about shelling in Tskhinvali, it is important to keep in mind exactly what Tskhinvali is. It is not a city somewhere in the middle of a republic that is being fired upon by saboteurs. On three sides, Tskhinvali is surrounded by Georgian villages. The edge of Tskhinvali is a military outpost. South Ossetian forces fire from there into the Georgian villages, and the Georgians respond with fire of their own. To help keep Georgian fire from hitting civilians in the city, all the South Ossetians would have to do is move their military base forward a couple hundred meters.
But, of course, it is a fundamental principle of terrorists the world over -- set up firing points in civilian areas and then when your enemy fires on you, you gleefully parade the bodies of your own children in front of the television cameras. Kokoity's terrorists are following this same principle. If South Ossetia can in any way be considered a state, it must be considered a terrorist state.
When we are told about "peaceful civilians" in South Ossetia, we must keep in mind that the situation there is similar to that in Palestinian refugee camps. South Ossetia, like the Palestinian Liberation Organization before it, is not a state or an ethos or a territory. It is a peculiar form of mutated government in which residents have been turned into militarized refugees. It is a quasi-armed force that is not allowed by the authorities to occupy itself with anything other than war -- a situation that gives the authorities absolute power and absolute control over the money at its disposal. It is a place where the hysteria of this disfigured population is the primary means of filling the authorities' personal coffers.
Even more surprising is the fact that the leaders of this region -- despite all their talk -- apparently have done very little to prepare for war and have turned out to be absolutely helpless. At the first sign of trouble, the general director of this joint venture hightailed it out of Tskhinvali. I was amazed to get news overnight that Russian journalists were hunkered down in the main government building and there wasn't even a bomb shelter there. What does that mean? That all the money Moscow allocated for our joint venture never made it outside the Moscow ring road? They were all shouting "Wolf, wolf!" but they didn't even manage to build a barn for the sheep?
Georgia, I think, will win in this conflict for the simple reason that it has a clear strategic goal. The Russian siloviki do not. Moreover, it turns out that these people -- who are pretty good at bankrupting factories and terrorizing companies -- ran without looking back when faced with a real army and all they are capable of doing is complaining to the United Nations.
Snippet from this article: