[Lady Dragonfly]

Finally, some journalists woke up:

The Bush administration's assurances of solidarity with a young democracy also may have given Georgia's silver-tongued, U.S.-educated leader a little too much swagger as he picked a playground fight he never could win on his own.

Colonel-General Nogovitsyn repeated an earlier charge that Georgian troops were engaged in genocide against civilians in South Ossetia, which he said he could "prove to the media."

"During their mop-up operations in South Ossetia, Georgian commandos have thrown hand grenades into the basements where civilians were hiding," he said. "That's what we call genocide."

This is my favorite:

Putin criticized the United States for viewing Georgia as the victim instead of the aggressor, and for airlifting Georgian troops back home from Iraq on Sunday.

"Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages," Putin said in Moscow. "And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilian alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection."