With Russian troops poised to sever Crimea from Ukraine, tough-talking conservatives are claiming they were right about the threat from Vladimir Putin all along. The Wall Street Journal interviewed former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who offered the West his lessons learned from losing the 2008 clash with the Russians. Meanwhile to the delight of the right-wing blogosphere, Sarah Palin boasted "I told ya so" about her October 2008 prediction that Ukraine would be next.
Of course, there's only one small problem with the crowing from conservatives now enjoying some schadenfreude at President Obama's expense. As we now know, Saakashvili himself bears much of the responsibility for starting the war with Russia.

You wouldn't know that from John McCain's announcement Friday that "we are all Ukrainians." If that sounds familiar, it should. McCain used the same formula in declaring "today we are all Georgians" after Russian forces occupied Abkazia and South Ossetia in August 2008. On Friday, McCain's running mate took the Facebook to gloat about her far-sightedness in seeing Russia from her house:

Yes, I could see this one from Alaska. I'm usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as "an extremely far-fetched scenario" by the "high-brow" Foreign Policy magazine. Here's what this "stupid" "insipid woman" predicted back in 2008: "After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next."

A broken clock is still right twice a day, giving it a much better record than Sarah Palin. And Palin like McCain was wrong when she told Charles Gibson of ABC News in September 2008, "For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable."
Sadly for Palin, In the fall of 2009, a report commissioned by the Council of the European Union instead found that Georgia "started unjustified war." While the EU analysis placed blame on both Tbilisi and Moscow for what transpired, it rejected the Georgian government's explanation that the attack was defensive. As the BBC reported:

"The shelling of Tskhinvali (the South Ossetian capital) by the Georgian armed forces during the night of 7 to 8 August 2008 marked the beginning of the large-scale armed conflict in Georgia," the report says.
It adds later: "There is the question of whether [this] use of force... was justifiable under international law. It was not."

While Georgia protested those conclusions, Commissioner Jorg Himmelreich described in the New York Times "the decisive role that the United States played before, during and after the conflict":

After 9/11, however, President Bush changed the policy toward Georgia, introducing two elements that developed into serious strategic disadvantages. Mr. Bush not only made Georgia into a partner in the "war on terror," but he promoted Mr. Saakashvili and Georgia into a centerpiece of his "promotion of democracy." In Tbilisi in 2005, Mr. Bush proclaimed Mr. Saakashvili's Georgia "a beacon of liberty."
Even as President Bush became increasingly aware that he needed the Kremlin's help in Iran and for other American interests, he was kept a prisoner by this exaggeration of Georgia's importance for U.S. foreign policy.
Senior officials of the Bush administration claim they warned Mr. Saakashvili against using force against Russia. But having invested so much ideological importance in the Georgian president, Mr. Bush couldn't warn him publicly -- or, as it turned out, stop him. Having become so dependent on Mr. Saakashvili's success, the United States lost the political influence to stop him.

As Wikileaks revealed in December 2010, the U.S. position was made worse by the fact that the Bush administration--and its allies like John McCain--gullibly believed everything Saakashvili told them. The leaked cables from Tblisi, the New York Times explained, "display some of the perils of a close relationship":

A 2008 batch of American cables from another country once in the cold war's grip -- Georgia -- showed a much different sort of access. In Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, American officials had all but constant contact and an open door to President Mikheil Saakashvili and his young and militarily inexperienced advisers, who hoped the United States would help Georgia shake off its Soviet past and stand up to Russia's regional influence...
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. Official Georgian versions of events were passed to Washington largely unchallenged.
The last cables before the eruption of the brief Russian-Georgian war showed an embassy relaying statements that would with time be proved wrong.

Proved wrong, that is, just like John McCain and Sarah Palin.