Michael Totten has the goods.
Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Instapundit reports:
I got home from the gym the other day and there was a message on my answering machine — it was Michael Yon, calling from Afghanistan on satphone to make sure I’d seen Michael Totten’s latest report. That tells you how good he is, doesn’t it? . . . So read it, and learn that much of what was reported was wrong.
If you want to know what’s going on there, just go read.