[LINK] "EU Report on South Ossetia War"

[rfmcdonald]

Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley suggests, after noting the evenhandedness of the recent European Union report on the Russo-Georgian war, that by some metrics Georgia did much better than one would have expected given past precedents.

I think it has to be noted that the scope of Russia's assault against Georgia was really trivial when compared to the scope of Israeli activity towards either Hezbollah or Hamas, or of US air attacks against Serbia during the Kosovo War. This is to say that the Russian attack looks positively restrained when compared with the intensity of the assaults against Serbia, Lebanon, or Iraq. Questions of moral equivalency aside, Georgia suffered far less, by any metric, in its war against Russia than Serbia suffered in its war against NATO. Now, it may be fairly argued that Russia is constrained by capabilities rather than intent; the Russian Air Force is simply not capable of carrying out a large scale assault of the same type that we saw in Kosovo or Lebanon, and as such Russia's deserves no kudos for restraint. I'm not sure that I agree 100% with that, since it does seem that Russia was at least somewhat sensitive to international opinion during the war. Nevertheless, we'd do well to keep in mind that Russian "brutality" was in fact far less brutal in effect (if not intent) than has become the norm for military intervention in the last decade.