The Guardian reports:

An investigation into last year's Russia-Georgia war delivered a damning indictment of President Mikheil Saakashvili today, accusing Tbilisi of launching an indiscriminate artillery barrage on the city of Tskhinvali that started the war.
The war started "with a massive Georgian artillery attack", the report said, citing an order from Saakashvili that the offensive was aimed at halting Russian military units moving into South Ossetia.
Flatly dismissing Saakashvili's version, the report said: "There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation ... Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive could not be substantiated ... It could also not be verified that Russia was on the verge of such a major attack."

Back in August 2008 when this conflict took place, the vast majority of commentators in the MSM took the line that Russia, and not Georgia, was the aggressor in the conflict.

So did most blogs-(even many so-called ‘leftist’ blogs); this blog was a rare exception.
There was a wave of Russophobia in the British and American media, which I commented on here and here. If you’d wanted to read the truth as to what was going on, and to who caused the conflict, you’d have been better reading the blog of our old friend The Exile, written from thousands of miles away in Mexico, than any anti-Russian columns from neo-con/’liberal’ interventionist ‘experts’ in ’serious’ British and American newspapers.

These people told us lies about the non-existent genocide in Kosovo, lies about Milosevic’s and Serbia’s ‘wars of aggression’, lies about Iraq’s non-existent WMDs and lies about Russia’s ’aggression’ against Georgia.

And now they’re telling us lies about the ’threat’ posed by Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons programme.

The lesson again, just in case anyone still hasn’t got it: don’t believe a word these serial liars ever tell you.

UPDATE: On the subject of the serial liars, John Pilger has a cracking piece in the new edition of the New Statesman.

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