"The knowledge of the truth about the past is necessary ," writes former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a letter to the Washington Post regarding the August war.

On August 10, 2008, when Russian aircrafts were bombing Tbilisi, US ambassador t addressed the UN Security Council"s extraordinary session and made public the details of the telephone conversation between Condoleezza Rice and Sergei Lavrov. Zalmay Khalilzade said that the purpose of the military operation was to overthrow the Georgian government.

At that time Rice instructed the US ambassador to UN to publicize the contents of Condoleezza Rice and Sergei Lavrov"s phone conversation.

Ten years later, Rice says that after seeing the Georgian cities wrapped in fire, she called the Russian Foreign Minister and asked Moscow to stop the military operation. Lavrov put forward three conditions to Rice.

"In a phone conversation days into the crisis, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told me there were three conditions for ending the war. First, the Georgians should sign a “no-use-of-force pledge” in the breakaway regions. Second, the Georgian forces had to return to their barracks. These were acceptable to the Georgian government and its allies. However, the third condition, which he said was “just between us,” shocked me. “Misha Saakashvili has to go.”, recollets Rice .
The US Secretary of State writes that she then saw the real motives of Russian military aggression.

The US Secretary of State"s article on the whole of August war shows all the backstage. What is happening in the White House cabinets when Russia bombed Georgia. Rice"s article in the influential American edition put the end to the speculations on who started the war.

The US Secretary of State regrets that she was unable to prevent Russian aggression, although she thinks that the mission was still fulfilled and the Bush administration saved Georgia.

We could not deter Moscow in this case. But we did act, and Georgia survived. It is still a sad story — and perhaps Putin did take the wrong lessons from it. In order to deter him in the future, however, we need to first get the facts right about the past.- says Rice