Yet another international organization is poking holes in the Georgian government's official narrative of last August's war. A new Amnesty International report finds that all participants in the conflict--the Georgian and Russian militaries as well as South Ossetian seperatists--failed to protect civilians. The New York Times reports:

Researchers in Tskhinvali concluded that Georgian forces had aimed Grad rockets at military targets — a Russian peacekeeper base, fuel depots and munitions stockpiles, among others — but that the targets were adjacent to civilian areas. The impact of the rockets had a radius of as much as 500 feet, and in some cases missiles struck a third of a mile away from what appeared to be their targets, the report said.

The researchers also found that several thousand civilians were in Tskhinvali the night of the attack, Aug. 7, and that 182 structures in the city were damaged, mostly in the first hours of the war.

Unlike the Georgian attack — described as “a fixed, localized incident that took place over eight hours” — the Russian bombardment that followed was sporadic and lasted for days, Mr. Dalhuisen said. The Georgian authorities commented on their military strategy to Amnesty International’s researchers, but Russian leaders did not.

The report found that Georgian towns, villages and civilians were hit during Russian bombing raids, sometimes “in the apparent absence of nearby military targets,” which would violate international law.

Russian infantry treated civilians in a disciplined fashion, but the Russians allowed South Ossetian forces to loot and set fires in the ethnic Georgian villages north of the separatist capital, the report determined. Amnesty International’s researchers “documented unlawful killings, beatings, threats, arson and looting” by armed South Ossetian groups, the report said.

On balance, the Russians probably come out looking worse, but the report's evenhanded tone will probably irritate the Georgian government, which has sought to portray itself as the innocent victim of Russian agression.

It also follows reports from OSCE monitors and the Times accusing Georgia of firing the first shot in the conflict, and one from Human Rights Watch condemning Georgia's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. Facing increasing internal opposition, the Saakashvili government is disputing the reports and calling for a new international investigation.

Whatever the Georgian government's guilt, the Amnesty report makes clear that its people continue to suffer the consequences.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

You gotta love it when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin goes uncensored while on official business, as he did during talks with Nicholas Sarkozy when the French president was at the Kremlin trying to forge a cease-fire after Russia invaded Georgia. In an attempt to illustrate just how hard he planned to lay the smack down on Georgia, Putin told Sarkozy, "I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls," referring to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Wait, it gets better:

Mr Sarkozy responded: "Hang him?"

"Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein," said Mr Putin.

Mr Sarkozy replied, using the familiar "tu": "Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?" Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then replied: "Ah, you have scored a point there."

The inside info on the Godfather-esque sitdown is via Sarkozy's chief foreign policy advisor, Jean-David Levitte, who disclosed the details of the French president's August meeting with Putin to Le Nouvel Observateur today. According to Levitte, Sarkozy was aware of Putin's plan to oust Saakashvili and warned against it.

Sarkozy reassured Saakashvili in Paris today that he'd be looking out for Georgia during tomorrow's meeting with EU leaders and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Nice.

On French radio, also today, the Georgian president reacted to Putin's threat by laughing nervously, responding that he'd heard something of the comments but not in such detail. "It's funny, all the same," he told the interviewer.

Photo: FILE; HRVOJE POLAN/AFP/Getty Images

Once again, UNOSAT's where it's at –- and this time their satellite imagery takes us to a very damaged South Ossetia:

UNOSAT

This map illustrates the structural damage wrought to villages between Kekhvi and Tskhinvali as of August 19, 2008, just three days after Russia signed a ceasefire bringing the Russian-Georgia war over the region to a close. Buildings either completely collapsed or with less than 50 percent of its roof still intact appear in red; those with visible structural damage to a wall or roof are marked in orange.

Interestingly (read: disturbingly), the map notes:

An important preliminary finding of this satellite damage analysis is the observed heavy concentration of damages within clearly defined residential areas."

Maybe that explains those remains of 500 civilians -- and they're still counting.

The Washington Post reports today that domestic criticism of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is growing now that wartime freedom of speech restrictions have been lifted. But while a number of opposition figures are hoping to capitalize on the crisis that has weakened the president's political standing, all are wary of being associated with Russia's calls for Saakashvili's ouster.

For this reason, Putin and Medvedev's constant hurling of insults at Saakashvili seems counterproductive. The one thing Georgians of all political stripes seem to agree on is the need to resist Russian domination, and it will be hard for an opposition movement to gain momentum as long as it's suspected of having Russian backing. Saakashvili was using this to his advantage well before war broke out.

If Medvedev really wants to undermine Saakashvili, why doesn't he just invite him up to Sochi for the weekend?

Russia's campaign to win international recognition for the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia isn't going as well as they may have hoped. So far only Nicaragua, of all places, has signed on. Belarus and Venezuela were both staunch supporters of Russia during the war with Georgia but haven't yet indicated that they intend to recognize the two regions. Moscow will push its case at a meeting of seven former-Soviet republics today in Moscow.

If you're keeping score for the "new cold war" at home, that's Kosovo: 46, South Ossetia and Abkhazia: 2.

Reading off McCain's teleprompter, Mark Halperin releases this tidbit from tonight's speech:

“We will make it clear to Russia’s rulers that acts of violence and intimidation come at a heavy cost.”

It will be interesting to hear how specific he gets in describing that cost.

In a related point, it was strange to hear Rudy Giuliani say last night that Barack Obama's "first instinct" when the war broke out was to "create a moral equivalency" between Georgia and Russia by calling for both sides to show restraint.

Obama's initial statement on Georgia was nearly identical to those from the State Department and White House. He also mentioned the need to "truly stand up for Georgia" during his convention speech and spoke with Mikheil Saakashvili on the phone yesterday. He certainly hasn't been as outspoken in support of Georgia as McCain, but Giuliani's statement was plain dishonest.

When FP spoke with analyst Paul Goble last week about the conflict in Georgia, he made the following interesting point:

I believe that one of the reasons the fighting stopped was not because there weren't people in the defense ministry who thought it should go on for a bit longer, but because in the first two working days of the war, there was a total of some $8 billion net capital outflow from Russia. You're talking about serious consequences for wealthy Russians [...] Polls tell us that for many Russians, the single most important right they acquired after 1991 was the right to travel. If getting a visa becomes more difficult, Russians are going to have a harder time moving about. It's going to be harder to get their children into elite international schools. There's going to be less money around. So, there's probably a constituency, and a pretty large one among an influential group of people, who are going to go to the Russian government and say, "You're hitting us where it matters most: in our pocketbooks." And that's a source of influence that should not be discounted at all.

Today, Andrei Piontkovsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow reads some tea leaves in the Kremlin and warns of the opposite effect: that hardline nationalists could be the ones who gain the upper hand.

Piontkovsky sees a split between "global and national kleptocrats." For now, he puts President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the global camp with Goble's wealthy Russians, and agrees that the two men restrained generals who were eager to roll the tanks into Tbilisi.

But the national kleptocrats, who "seem to believe that they can live without overseas assets, or without educating their children and maintaining residences in the West," present a growing threat, Piontkovsky argues. "They are content to own properties in elite residential areas around Moscow and in Russia, such as Rublyovka, Valday, and Krasnaya Polyana," and care little for the fruits of globalization.

While no one yet knows the national plutocrats' names, I believe that they are new, influential players in or associated with the Kremlin, and that they have now become bold enough to challenge both Putin and Medvedev. Russia's military chiefs, for whom it is psychologically difficult to be ordered by politicians to abruptly end a large-scale and successful military operation, are their natural allies.

I cannot predict who will win this growing confrontation. But even if the global kleptocrats sustain their more "moderate" position on Georgia, theirs could be a Pyrrhic victory. Every day and every hour, by means of their own propaganda, these globally minded kleptocrats, are setting the path to power for the nationalists.

Piontkovsky ends with an ominous premonition:

Putin once said that "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union." The national kleptocrats may soon start calling for its reversal, and they are in an increasingly strong position to do so.

Civil Georgia reports that President Mikheil Saakashvili is planning to introduce a "Patriot Act" to prevent Russian subversion of the Georgian government:

Saakashvili said that he planned to propose the parliament to develop “the patriotic act” and added that this new legislature – details of which he did not elaborate – would no way infringe the civil liberties.

“This will be carried out under the condition of maintaining democracy; freedom and liberties,” he added and repeated it for coupe of more times.

He said that the act was needed to prevent “external attempts to destabilize the country.

It's not clear yet exactly what this act will entail.

That was quick.

Only three days after Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia, officials from the disputed territory now say they plan to become part of Russia in the near future:

Soon there will be no North or South Ossetia — there will be a united Alania as part of Russia," [Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Tarzan] Kokoiti said, using another name for Ossetia.

"We will live in one united Russian state," he said.

Only this morning, the New York Times ran a feature on Ossetian nationalists imagining a future as the Andorra or Liechtenstein of the Caucasus. Oh well.

Vladimir Putin's made it fairly clear over the last few years that he's not all that concerned about his popularity in the West. Still, it's strange to see the normally well-spoken prime minister descend to Ahmadinejad-level paranoid bombast:

"The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US President."

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

Last Thursday, Georgia's former president Eduard Shevardnadze told Reuters that "now is not the time" to criticize Mikheil Saakashvili's handling of the South Ossetia war. I guess this week that time has come.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Shevardnadze not only criticizes the man who overthrew him in 2003 for bungling the war, he all but blames him for starting it:

Many people blame the Georgian president. They are wrong in part, but there is also an element to truth to it. He can't be accused of having acted illegally. It was legal to move our forces into [the South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali. But it would have been better not to. When he did decide to go in he should have blocked the Roki Tunnel which the Russians came through. The failure to do so was a tactical mistake. He apparently didn't think things through to the end. He evidently had not expected the Russians to take control of Gori, Poti and Senaki, or perhaps come as far as Tbilisi. If I had been in his shoes, I certainly would not have marched in.

Shevardnadze also attacks Germany and France for blocking Georgia's NATO membership back in April, which he says encouraged Russia to take more aggressive action. But interestingly, he also believes Saakashvili made a mistake in pulling Georgia out of the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States.

Judging from the interview, Shevardnadze seems to believe that it should have been possible to move Georgia toward greater cooperation with the U.S. and Europe while simultaneously improving relations with Russia and peacefully resolving the seperatist conflicts. While Saakashvili certainly deserves much of the criticism that has come his way in recent weeks, it's hard to imagine that any Georgian leader -- and certainly not Shevardnadze -- could have pulled all that off.

Abkhazian flag	South Ossetian flag

Russia's State Duma unanimously approved a resolution today to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the breakaway regions of Georgia, as independent states. This move has been hinted at for months but obviously, as RIA-Novosti observes, "the Georgian-Russian conflict has dramatically changed the position of the self-proclaimed republics."

President Medvedev still has to approve the resolution, but it's not too early to consider the implications of Russia's recognition. This development seems to be the best indication so far that the dreaded Kosovo effect -- the emboldening of separatist movements around the world in the wake of Kosovo's recognition -- was more than just hype. This was exactly what the Georgians had in mind when they decided not to recognize Kosovo last winter.

While U.N. membership for the two new states is about as likely as Putin and Saakashvili taking a fishing trip this fall, it will be interesting to see if any countries follow Russia's lead and recognize them. Recognition has historically had much more to do with politics than international law and it's quite possible that countries hoping to curry favor with the Russians --Belarus and Venezuela come to mind -- might set up ties with the de facto states. Analyst Paul Goble believes 15 to 20 countries might join in, hardly an international consensus but still enough to avoid a "Cyprus scenario" where the states would be recognized by only one other country.

This month's events have given some other frozen conflict participants pause as well. Medvedev was leaning pretty hard on Moldova's president this weekend, urging him not to repeat the "Georgian mistake" by trying to retake control of the quasi-independent Transnistria region, which is tepidly supported by Russia. The Moldovans seem to have gotten the message and I wouldn't be surprised if Moscow continued to use the former Soviet Union's separatist movements for political leverage. (Crimea, perhaps?)

Let the recognition wars begin.

Mikheil Saakashvili on why Georgia didn't launch an insurgency against Russia, à la Chechnya:

Eventually we would have chased them away, but we would have had to go to the mountains and grow beards. That would have been a tremendous national philosophical and emotional burden."

It seems increasingly clear that Russian troops are not, in fact, pulling all the way out of Georgia:

Russian units said they had orders only to fall back as far as South Ossetia and some platoons were still dug in near roads outside Gori, while Russian troops bearing new peacekeeping badges dominated the main east-west highway, a key trading artery. A senior Russian official said Russian military checkpoints ringing South Ossetia would be permanent.

Moreover, it seems the Russian high command hasn't put much thought into the whole public diplomacy thing. Here are two more shots of Russian peacekeepers flipping Getty photographer Uriel Sinai the bird:

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

John McCain might be great pals with Mikheil Saakashvili now, but as Politico's Gleen Thrush notes, he once had equally nice things to say about Eduard Shevardnadze, the communist party official-turned-president that Saakashvili led a peaceful revolution to oust in 2003.

McCain told a University of Arizona audience in 1999:

The mindless slaughters being conducted by a Russian military that seeks to reassert itself not only in the former Soviet Union, but also to extend its reach throughout what used to be the former Soviet Union in an attempt to fold back into the Russian empire those countries that have broken away from it, most notably Georgia, which is headed by one the great men in the history of the world, Mr. Shevardnadze.

Last week, McCain told an audience in New Mexico that Georgia used to have "a corrupt government headed by a guy named Shevardnadze, who you may remember from the days of the Cold War."

There weren't any links in the Politico post, so I was curious where Thrush dredged up this apparent flip-flop. Turns out it's highlighted on McCain's own Web site as an example of his "prescient" stance on Georgia. Here's a video.

Perhaps McCain's just another one of those Georgia-loving Americans, no matter who's in charge.

Sort of. At least that's the takeaway from a just-released Gallup poll of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which found that more Georgians would like to see Arizona Sen. John McCain (23%) elected U.S. president than Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (15%):

It's worth noting that "don't know" still carries the day in this survey, conducted in June 2008, of 1,080 adults aged 15 and older. As Gallup's Neli Esipova observes, it's surprising just how little interest Georgians evince in the U.S. presidential campaign, given how important American military and diplomatic support is to that country. Still, an outright majority of Georgians believe it "makes a difference" who is the commander in chief:

This poll was conducted before the fighting broke out in August, so it will be interesting to see whether public opinion has since shifted in any way.

I'm also surprised McCain's margin isn't higher. The Arizona senator has taken a decidedly pro-Georgian, anti-Russian line in his public comments, and he even went jet-skiing with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in August 2006. The two men have been friendly since 1997. Saakashvili cited McCain's comment that "Today, we are all Georgians" in a speech in Tbilisi on August 12. And McCain's chief foreign-policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, was a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government until last March.

I see two risks in this obviously close relationship. First, Saakashvili needs to avoid being seen as supporting one candidate over another. What if Obama wins and sees Saakashvili as having played partisan games? That scenario may explain why Georgia hastily invited Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden to Tbilisi last weekend after McCain announced that he was sending Sens. Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, his two main allies.

The second risk is, what if McCain wins but public opinion turns sharply against Saakashvili for blundering into war? The United States' image will surely suffer as a result. McCain needs to be careful about emphasizing support for Georgia the state rather than Saakashvili the man.

KAZBEK BASAYEV/AFP/Getty Images

The Georgian Times is running a piece today on the history of the Roki Tunnel, which runs beneath the Caucasus mountains connecting South Ossetia and Russia. As one of the only routes connecting North and South Ossetia, the tunnel was critical in Russia's ability to launch its counterattack into Georgia on Aug. 8.

Georgians long resisted the construction of the tunnel during the Soviet period, fearful of an influx of North Ossetians into Georgia, but the project was finally greenlit in the early 1990s by Georgia's first communist party secretary and later president Eduard Shevardnadze. The Georgian Times notes:

Shevardnadze perhaps did not imagine, when signing off the Roki project, what a fatal role this tunnel would play in the history of Georgia."

It's still unclear to me why the Georgian military was unable to block the tunnel during their initial incursion into South Ossetia. President Saakashvili claims that this was part of the plan and troops simply did not reach the tunnel in time. But the Georgian air force has fighter jets and helicopters and it seems possible that they could have attacked the tunnel from the air at the same time, or even before the ground assault on Tskhinvali, perhaps delaying the Russian counterattack long enough to better establish their position. Georgia tried (unsuccessfully) to blow up the tunnel during the civil war in 1991 so it's not like this is a new idea.

Any readers with a military background care to weigh in?

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev plays to the gallery in North Ossetia:

The world has seen that even today, there are political morons who are ready to kill innocent and defenseless people in order to satisfy their self-serving interests, while compensating for their own inability to resolve complicated issues by using the most terrible solution -- by exterminating an entire people."

The quote from a senior Russian military commander doesn't really fill me with confidence that the Russian occupation of Georgia is ending any time soon:

I can say for certain when the New Year will come but I cannot give an exact date for the withdrawal of our troops from the conflict area yet," said Col.-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn. "I can only say that we will not be leaving as fast as we came."

Russia seems to be continuing the dismantling of Georgia's miltiary infrastructure even as President Medvedev speaks as if the withdrawal is already happening. In spite of Nogovitsyn's assurances that troops are pulling out of the central Georgian city of Gori, there's no sign that they're leaving.

It's now been almost a week since Medvedev ordered a ceasefire. I'm curious to see how long the Russians can plausibly claim to be withdrawing without any of their troops actually leaving Georgia.

Kevin Drum does yeoman's work here in batting down the argument, frequently offered in recent days, that the Bush administration somehow encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili's reckless attack on South Ossetia:

Look: Saakashvili came to power on a Georgian nationalist platform of recovering Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He's been jonesing for an excuse to send troops in for years, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do. Likewise, Putin has been eagerly waiting for an excuse to pound the crap out of him in return — again, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do.

Kevin correctly lists Kosovo and NATO enlargement among several "general" drivers of the conflict, but I would be more specific. Let's roll the tape.

When Western countries recognized Kosovo in February, then-President Vladimir Putin immediately threatened to do the same regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia and promised to deploy more "peacekeeping" troops there. And he made good on his warning in April, granting the two breakaway regions a status just short of official recognition.

The Georgians were duly provoked, and they got busy mobilizing troops and preparing fuel supplies. In May, Russia deployed troops to Abkhazia; Georgia's state minister warned that the two countries were "very close" to war. By August, volunteers were pouring into South Ossetia from southern Russia, and the two sides were trading fire. All the while, as Kevin points out, State Department officials were trying to convince Saakashvili to "stay cool."

Foolishly, he didn't, and here we are. But if anyone encouraged this conflict, it was Moscow, not Washington. If Saakashvili thought the U.S. military would come to his aid, then he's simply delusional -- there was no way it was going to happen.

On a broader level, the Bush administration made two key mistakes. The first was setting an awkward precedent in Kosovo. It would have been smarter to leave the situation ambiguous, like Taiwan. The second was in trying to bring Georgia into NATO prematurely. When in April, Germany and France delayed Georgia's membership action plan (MAP) until it had settled its internal conflicts, that was basically an invitation to Putin to destabilize the country. It would have been better not to push for a MAP at all.

In short, a naive and overconfident West has badly misjudged how Putin would respond to its diplomatic moves. That's the real problem here -- not some imagined whispering in Saakashvili's ear.