A cease fire in Georgia?

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have brokered a cease fire agreement between Russia and Georgia that will halt the fighting that has raged in the region for the past five days. Sarkozy appeared this morning in Moscow with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to unveil a six-point plan to end the fighting. Sarkozy will now fly to Tbilisi to get Mikhail Saakashvili's approval on the deal.

It's clear that the five-day conflict has been a disaster for Georgia. The Georgians hoped that their military action would bring the separatist region of South Ossetia back under their control, instead Georgian forces appear to have been driven from the area entirely. And rebel forces in Georgia's other separatist region, Abkhazia, are claiming to have pushed the Georgian military from that province as well. Meanwhile, Russian forces conducted actions deep into the territory of Georgia proper attacking the Georgian military in the towns of Gori and Senaki, which the Georgians were using as staging areas for military operations into the separatist regions. In announcing the Russian side of the cease-fire, Medvedev said that Russia's goals in the operation had been achieved.

But while the combat shows signs of cooling down, the rhetoric is heating up, especially in the American press. Russia is clearly being painted as the aggressor, with analogies to Nazi Germany's invasions of their neighbors in 1938 and 39 being the most common tool. Of course these analogies ignore that the current conflict seems to have been sparked by Georgia's attack on the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali late Thursday, which would then make Georgia the aggressor in this case, not Russia. Groups like the UN are trying to figure out how many people have been killed in the conflict so far (a tough task given the tens of thousands who have been driven from their homes), but the figure most quoted is about 2,000. Of that number it’s thought that 1,500 to 1,600 were killed in Tskhinvali alone (which only had a population of around 40,000 before the conflict).

The worst commentator I heard so far has been retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney, a military analyst with Fox News. McInerney, not only repeated the Russia/Nazi analogies, but also said that the US needed to take direct military action against Russia because of their actions in Georgia.

Gen. McInerney as a professional soldier though, should realize that from a strictly military point of view (I mean leaving out humanitarian, political, and who shot first arguments), the Russian operation in Georgia was very well planned and executed. The strikes into Georgia made sense: attacking staging areas like Gori prevented the Georgians from mounting a counter-offensive, while hitting airfields allowed the Russians to have air-superiority, something vital on the modern battlefield. I would think as a general McInerney would have mapped out a similar plan if he had been given the task.

But past that, given the United States military actions in the past decade, there is something disingenuous about a former general condemning Russia's actions. Of course the past five years in Iraq immediately spring to mind, but the NATO campaign against Serbia in 1999 is a more apt comparison.

Finally prodded to action after charges of ethnic cleansing started rolling out of Kosovo, NATO (though the United States did the bulk of the work) launched into an 88-day bombing campaign against Serbian forces to halt their military campaign in Kosovo. But even though the fighting was all taking place in Kosovo, the bombing campaign hit targets throughout Serbia, including many sites in the capital Belgrade. Not only were military installations targeted, but also so were power plants, communications centers (radio stations, telephone exchanges and the like) and bridges. I believe that every bridge over the Danube was damaged or destroyed in the course of the bombing.

The explanation was that these facilities were all important for the Serbian war effort and therefore legitimate targets for the bombing campaign, nevermind that these were also important facilities for the everyday lives of Serbs in Belgrade. My point (beyond the idea that there's no such thing as a humane war) is that the United States has to realize that when it undertakes unilateral (or near unilateral) actions against other sovereign nations, it sets a precedent for other countries to follow, and our howls of protest ring a little hollow when other countries follow our blue print.