On August 8, 2008 Georgia under President Mikhail Saakashvili at the instigation of the Bush administration and PNAC neocons launched a major military offensive to retake the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russia responded by sending tanks and troops into the area and rapidly broke Georgia’s offensive, forcing Georgian forces to retreat and abandon their aggresssion against the two provinces, and in the process announced to the world that the geopolitical balance of power had shifted and had been shifting for some time while Bush has had the US bogged down in quicksand in Iraq.
South Ossetia and Abkhazia have both moved to request UN and international recognition of their independence from Georgia, and South Ossetians have announced their intention to reunite with North Ossetia under the Russian Federation.
The McCain campaign, the Bush Administration, and US media have turned the situation and reality on it’s head with continual rhetoric condemning Russia for “aggression” and attempts to encircle Russia with a “missile defense shield”, when it was in reality Georgia supported by Washington and the neocons that had committed the aggression.
Obama has picked up on the McCain narrative and has also condemned Russia calling them the “aggressor”, and is now fighting the election on McCain’s terms trying to show that he is as “tough” or tougher than McCain on “national security”.
Andrei P. Tsygankov, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at San Francisco State University explains in this Real News video, and thinks that Obama will lose the election to McCain unless he rapidly differentiates himself from McCain over “national security” in the last few weeks of the campaign.