Did the U.S. give Georgia the green light?

Last week the media did start to ask the question: Did the U.S. give Georgia the green light to attack South Ossetia? At the risk of rehashing a rehash of a rehashed article, I'll point you to last week's article by Fred Kaplan in Slate and this post on the Carpetbegger Report by Steve Benen who does a good job of detailing recent media coverage into the matter.

It appears clear that the U.S. government's recent bolstering of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili by urging the country to join NATO, personally training its troops and adopting 2,000 of its servicemen as coalition forces in Iraq, that America was very much giving Georgia every indication that it supported its efforts to rid itself of Russian troops in its rebel regions. Check out the stories referenced above for far more clarity from armchair journalists than another armchair journalist (myself) could bring to the matter.

Check out this interview on Democracy Now! the other day with Michael Klare, author of 13 books on globalization and oil wars, who plainly lays out the argument that the Russian-Georgia war is about oil.