Based on information from Russian defense officials and, no doubt, years of KGB savvy, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has surmised that the U.S. provoked the Georgia conflict in order to give John McCain a boost: “The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of U.S. president.”

He may be onto something, considering the neoconservative fingerprints all over this thing and John McCain’s man crush on the Georgian president. In fact, Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer made a similar argument — without the benefit of Russian intelligence — in a recent column.