And About the Georgian 'Atrocities'

Given the terrible crimes that the Georgians were inflicting on innocent South Ossetians according to the Russians, we should all be glad that Russia had the foresight to prepare an invasion force to go into Georgia on a moment's notice. The dead of Tskhinvali have been avenged by Putin. Nobody can undo the destruction of the city which the Russians have compared to Stalingrad in World War II, but justice has been done.

But wait, that atrocity is just a city:

Not only was the destruction in Tskhinvali a far cry from Stalingrad after World War II, it was well short of what happened in the southern Beirut suburbs during Israel's war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, or the Iraqi city of Fallujah during U.S. fighting against insurgents in November 2004.

In short, the city was scarred but still standing.

The doctor at the Tskhinvali hospital, Tina Zakharova, said she wanted to clarify that she wasn't disagreeing with the South Ossetian officials' numbers, adding that many bodies had been buried in gardens and cemeteries in outlying villages. She could not, however, explain how more than 2,000 dead — the difference between her hospital's count and the Kremlin-backed officials' tally — were buried in a relatively small area without any evidence such as stacks of coffins or mass funerals.

Researchers for Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, had similar findings as McClatchy about casualty numbers in Tskhinvali. A doctor at the city's hospital told the group's researchers that 44 bodies were brought by and was "adamant" that they represented the majority of deaths there because the city's morgue was not functioning at the time.

"Obviously there's a discrepancy there, a big discrepancy," Rachel Denber, deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, said about the apparently inflated casualty figures. "It's not clear to us at all where those numbers are coming from."

Russia made it up. Because Georgia isn't Saddam's Iraq or Milosevic's Serbia or the Taliban's Afghansitan, Putin knew he had to make up dead South Ossetians to provide a pretext for his invasion of Georgia. Putin just couldn't count on Georgians doing the dirty deed themselves straight up.

Hey, maybe the reason the Russians are taking so long to pull out is that their Chechen friends need time to commit enough atrocities to match Russia's claims.

Strategic partners don't pull stunts like this. Russia doesn't have to be our enemy. But they can't be our friend.