The cables show that for several years, as Georgia entered an escalating contest with the Kremlin for the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway enclaves out of Georgian control that received Russian support, Washington relied heavily on the Saakashvili government’s accounts of its own behavior. In neighboring countries, American diplomats often maintained their professional distance, and privately detailed their misgivings of their host governments. In Georgia, diplomats appeared to set aside skepticism and embrace Georgian versions of important and disputed events.

By 2008, as the region slipped toward war, sources outside the Georgian government were played down or not included in important cables [bold mine-DL]. Official Georgian versions of events were passed to Washington largely unchallenged. ~The New York Times

Eli Lake has continued this tradition of setting aside skepticism and embracing Georgian versions of events. He has reported on leaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi, which was depending heavily on the Georgian government for its information and uncritically reporting back what the Georgians told our diplomats, and he has done this without doing much to contextualize the reports he is citing. The Weekly Standard‘s John Noonan is pleased by this:

Lake’s piece is a narrative buster. For the past two years, a growing false narrative has emerged about how the Russian invasion was morally reprehensible but ultimately “provoked by the Georgians.”

Actually, it isn’t a “narrative buster” or anything close to it. Pretty much everyone accepts that the Kremlin kept trying to bait Saakashvili into escalating the conflict over the republics, and that he was finally stupid and reckless enough to turn a manageable dispute into a full-scale war with disastrous consequences for South Ossetia and Georgia. U.S. policy of backing Saakashvili no matter how reckless and confrontational he became enabled him to wreck his country. Turning Georgia into a front-line state as part of a general anti-Russian policy backfired badly, and it was the Georgians who suffered because of this. The U.S. failure to question or doubt Saakashvili and his government was an important contributing factor to the escalation of hostilities in 2008. U.S.-Georgian relations between 2004-08 are an excellent example of what happens when a government combines unwise foreign policy and diplomatic malpractice.

Incredibly, our government’s practice of taking the Georgian government’s word at face value as reflected in these cables is now being cited as “proof” that the Georgian government was not responsible for the provocations it obviously engaged in. It was the Georgian government that escalated hostilities in August 2008, and one would expect that information derived from the Georgian government’s own views of previous episodes would tend to confirm a pro-Georgian interpretation of the years leading up to August 2008. As the NYT article reminds us:

The [OSCE] observers, in the heart of the conflict zone, did not report hearing or seeing any Ossetian artillery attacks in the hours before Georgia bombarded Tskhinvali. Rather, they reported to an American political officer that “the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali began at 2335 on Aug. 7 despite the cease-fire.”

No Westerner critical of Georgia’s government has denied that there were ongoing tensions between the separatist republics and Georgia that sometimes erupted into violence, no one denies that separatist militias had been launching small-scale attacks against Georgian positions in the months prior to the 2008 war, and no one denies that Russia was encouraging the separatist republics in their activities for the last several years. I don’t doubt that Russia armed the separatist republics, but it is hard to separate this from U.S. efforts to arm and train the Georgian army. What is lacking in this account is any mention on the ongoing reckless, confrontational attitude of the Georgian government under Saakashvili since he first came to power. It is impossible to understand Russian intensified activities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia without seeing it primarily as a reaction against Saakashvili’s rise to power, his preoccupation with “reintegration” of the separatist republics, and his insistence on aligning Georgia with NATO with Washington’s obvious encouragement.

It is worth noting that the cables sent home by our embassy in Tbilisi on the eve of the 2008 war were quite unreliable:

The last cables before the eruption of the brief Russian-Georgian war showed an embassy relaying statements that would with time be proved wrong.

It is possible that some of the earlier cables contain correct information, and the Georgian government fed more misinformation to our embassy in 2008 than it had before, but something that all these cables should remind us is that foreign governments are going to give our diplomats information that they want us to have and report things to our diplomats as they want the U.S. to see them. If our diplomats accept the other government’s statements uncritically and do not check them against other sources, as they apparently did in Tbilisi, that will leave Washington blind to realities that the other government doesn’t want the U.S. to see. For a new client state with a reckless foreign policy such as Georgia, misinforming its patron might be a vital part of maintaining U.S. support for the client while it carries out its “reintegration” policy. Similarly, the “true” beliefs of a foreign ruler or head of government conveyed to U.S. diplomats and reported back in diplomatic cables may simply be what he thinks the U.S. wants to hear, and not necessarily what he “truly” believes but can only say in private. Leaked cables are not necessarily giving us new or more reliable information. They are often conveying the same propaganda and sycophantic appeals in a different medium.