They certainly could have set up a situation where circumstances allowed for something bad to happen, but I doubt it was some Machivellian plan.  They didn't know that Putin was going to drop on Georgia like a bag of hammers.  It was more that people like Condi and McCain promised the Georgian leaders that the USA was behind them 100%, and he did something dumb with unforseeable consequences.

A similar thing happened with the first Gulf War.  Bush the Greater had diplomatic people tell Saddam Hussein that we were done getting involved in their Middle Eastern politics or armed conflicts, and Hussein translated that to mean that we wouldn't mind if he knocked over a few countries for their oil and ports.  He was pretty surprised when he invaded Kuwait only to find the US (who basically put him in power in the first place to counteract Iran) leading an international coalition against him.

The Bush Doctrine, as far as I can tell, isn't so much about manipulating foreign events to start wars as being as bellicose and arrogant as possible in hopes that bad people will start some shit.  The new Iraq War, of course, is the exception; McCain, Bush the Lesser, and Cheney had decided we had to attack Hussein the minute they won the 2000 election.

But I would trust Putin even less.

we can't afford to be diverting our attention from the task at hand. there is no way that you're going to be able to prove that bush was behind this. the nature of these kinds of allegations is that if Dems are seen cosigning this kind of inquiry, the media will be asking "why are the Democrats taking the word of a KGB spy over the US government?"

the american people have said loud and clear that what they care about right now is the economy. we need to spend every day from now until election day hammering mccain for taking bush's "country club economics" playbook as his own.

ok, so there was an american passport. do you really believe that it's unusual that there would be US spies in the region? how are you going to prove that they were actually taking part in the hostilities?

Believe neither of them.  Russia orchestrated the Georgia "ruse," not the U.S.  It certainly benefits us none at all, and the average-joe doesn't give a shit about what happens in some country on the other side of the world that doesn't involve Americans.  If it was a wag-the-dog scenario, it was done piss-poorly.  Even more piss-poorly than we've come to expect from Bush.

Russia orchestrated the action. Full-stop. Period. It wasn't Georgia, which was the victim. And it certainly wasn't the USA -- the USA wasn't even involved at all.

The assholes that keep trying to present this as a Russia-vs-USA conflict are basically disregarding as trivial the whole existence of Georgia as a nation with its own rights. That's the way PUTIN wants you to look at the situation -- because once the situation is seen as Russia-vs-USA (instead of the proper Russia-vs-Georgia) then no harm no foul: they didn't invade USA. They invaded instead some territory that's much closer to Moscow than it's to Washington. Other nations don't matter one bit.

Other nations, other people, besides Russians and Americans aren't real, according to PUTIN's imperialism apologists.

So fuck this. If you're so desperate to to attack Bush that you end up justifying Putin one bit, then you've lost EVERYTHING. You've lost your integrity, you've lost your judgement, you've lost your soul.

This isn't about American elections, you parochial idiot that fails to understand that your American asses aren't always in the center of the universe.

The war between Russia and Georgia is about RUSSIA AND GEORGIA.

...trying to hide the fact he is about to assimilate those regions into Russia, either outright, or defacto.  If we start buying into What Puting is saying, without some really hard evidence, we run the risk of getting off message.  Supporting the word of a Neo-Stalinist is counterproductive at this point, and would play into GOP hands