Bernard is engaged

Yes, Bernard is engaged:

The Americans have sent blankets and the Estonians doctors, but it is the French, surely, who have come to the rescue of South Ossetia's people, with their offer to send nouveau philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy.

One of a brigade of intellectuals dispatched from Paris, Lévy has made quite an impression at the Tbilisi Marriott, where he is ensconced with an entourage of personal cameraman, photographer, publicist and bodyguard.

"It's not too difficult to spot them," says a fellow guest. "They are all loafing around in the foyer puffing clouds of smoke, and gesticulating meaningfully. BHL is in his element going around in a crumpled white shirt, hair coiffed into a sort of wind tunnel effect, and reeking of perfume." Pressed as to his purpose in entering the war zone, Lévy stresses his visit wasn't mere tokenism. "I am an involved intellectual," he insists. "I came because I think the stakes are huge."

via. But what is Bernard engaged in?

The official US/Georgian version, as stated by president Mikheil Saakashvili to the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, is that the Russians simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign accusing the Georgians of preparing for war, evacuated women and children from the South Ossetian "capital" Tskhinvali, massed troops and sent Russian tanks through the Roki tunnel that separates Russia from South Ossetia - all before Saakashvili gave the order to fire.

But a timeline based on information provided by the government of Georgia shows Georgian troops occupying villages in South Ossetia at 2.45am on August 8th, and the first Russian troops entering South Ossetia through the Roki tunnel nearly three hours later.

The Georgians fired multiple rocket launcher systems (MRLS) (also known as Grads or Stalin's organs) on Tskhinvali that same night.

The Irish Times adds:

… It was a bit rich to hear the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice condemning Russia for using cluster bombs in Georgia. The last time anyone used cluster bombs - which are banned by more than 100 countries - it was Israel in Lebanon. I don't recall Rice condemning Israel for it.

AFAIR, Most of the cluster bombs used in Lebanon were delivered via artillery, with the aim of creating a cordon sanitaire across Israel’s border. And guess who was there while that was going on?

And then, finally, I note a strange vehicle. It resembles the two self-propelled cannons, but it is stationed far behind them and doesn’t shoot: this is a mobile command post that you enter, as in a submarine, through a central turret and down a ladder; there are six men in it, seven on some days, and they are busy working with a battery of computers, radar screens and other transmission devices. Their role is to determine the parameters of the firing by collecting information that will be transmitted to the artillerymen. Here, at the root of Israeli firepower, is a veritable laboratory of war where soldier-scholars deploy their intelligence, noses glued to the screens, trying to integrate even the most imponderable facts about the terrain into their calculations. Their goal is to establish the distance to the target and how fast the target moves, as well as to consider the proximity of the civilians, whom they want to avoid at all cost.

Yes, Bernard was engaged there too.

Comments

[alle]

Engaged, maybe, but was he there? Rue89 seems to have caught him with what could be unphilosophically described as a "lie". (In French.)

[Alex]

But what is truth?

[ajay]

But a timeline based on information provided by the government of Georgia shows Georgian troops occupying villages in South Ossetia at 2.45am on August 8th, and the first Russian troops entering South Ossetia through the Roki tunnel nearly three hours later.

Virtually simultaneously, in other words. Impressive.