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A blogger does better than the Telegraph in dealing with the origin of the Georgia conflict:...an excerpt:

The West is ideologically divided. Too many of us believe the Russian lies. We believe, in our simplistic way, that tiny Georgia provoked mighty Russia. We haven’t bothered to find out what actually happened. Here are just a few indications that Moscow planned everything in advance: (1) Last month the Russian army practiced invading a small country; (2) Russia recalled its ambassadors to Moscow for a meeting on July 15 to discuss a new foreign policy concept connected to the necessity of “defending” Russian speaking people in unnamed other countries; (3) Moscow’s South Ossetian proxy evacuated ethnic woman and children before beginning an intense bombardment of Georgian villages; (4) The South Ossetian artillery opened fire at 11 pm, while the Georgian artillery didn’t return fire until 12:30 am; (5) Russian mechanized columns were actually moving into Georgia prior to Georgia’s push into South Ossetia on 8 August ; (6) The Russians were mobilizing ships in the Black Sea weeks before the supposed “Georgian aggression”; (7) Georgian internet sites came under intensive Russian attack in advance of military operations.

Regarding this last point, the New York Times published an article by John Markoff titled Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks. According to Markoff, “Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia” someone was attacking Georgian Web servers. Of special interest, there was “a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: ‘win+love+in+Rusia.’” Later attacks brought images of Adolf Hitler set next to images of Georgian President Saakashvili, to the Web site of the Georgian parliament. Moscow’s attacks on Georgian government sites began “as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests … that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.”

Do you still think Georgia started the war?

As incredible as it sounds, the Russian disinformation specialists want you to believe Dick Cheney started the war. On Aug. 14 Russian television served up a poisonous dosage from Dr. Sergei Markov, a senior political scientist at the Kremlin. According to Markov, Dick Cheney wants to help John McCain win the election in November. To this end Cheney is attempting to start a new Cold War with Russia. Given a Cold War atmosphere, McCain would defeat Obama at the polls. Markov further claimed that the U.S. was engineering an armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

While the Russians burn and pillage Georgian towns and villages, strangling Georgia’s economy to the point of collapse, the free world dithers. As one American analyst bitterly remarked, “The Europeans have telegraphed their total capitulation to Russia, and Moscow knows it. The Kremlin has looked into the soul of Europe and found – there is none.”

According to the New York Times, the White House suddenly finds the Russian leadership “deceptive and evasive.” Where have these people been during the past nine decades? When has the Kremlin been anything but “deceptive and evasive”? Nothing is more exasperating than the recent comments of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was “not predicting a return to the Cold War.” But the Cold War never ended, Mr. Gates! The Russian side merely repeated the Soviet experiment of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. What Moscow did in the 1920s was accomplished on a larger scale in the 1990s. Do these America Sovietologists have any common sense whatsoever, or has the economic requirements of our commercial culture so overwhelmed strategic common sense that recognizing one’s enemy has become impossible for them?

According to Gates, “My view is that the Russians [are] … interested in reasserting Russia’s … great power or superpower status … in Russia’s traditional spheres of influence.” A correction is required at this point. The Russians are interested in the destruction of the United States.

It is time to understand what we are dealing with.