And that article concludes with:
>>In the 1990s, the baton was passed to the left; Mujihadeen forces effectively became the armed wing of Western liberal opinion, moving across borders to fight what politicians and liberal commentators in the West considered to be 'good wars', from Bosnia to Kosovo and also in Chechnya. It was the internationalisation of local conflicts by Western governments that encouraged the internationalisation of the Mujihadeen, transforming what had been a specific Afghan-based phenomenon into an effectively global force.
The same politicians and commentators who applauded the interventions of the 1990s - some of whom wrote glowing accounts of the 'brave' and 'cool' Mujihadeen in Western newspapers during the Yugoslav and Kosovo wars (15) - are as shocked as everyone else by the Beslan school siege. But perhaps, as well as condemning those who attacked innocent children and their parents, they should also interrogate their earlier support for 'humanitarian intervention' and their continuing support for Western interference abroad.>>end of quote
Where does this guy's political spectrum start from? No one ever passed a baton to the left I know, nor even asked their opinion in the mainstream media. It was the left that protested most vociferously about where Bush I/Talbot/Baker and Clinton were taking the world. Also, weren't the same charges of 'total irrationality and incomprehensibility' made at, for example, the IRA when it took its bombing campaign to the UK? And, does any nationally connected civil war make 'sense' to anyone except the sides fighting it?
This article seems to imply that there are politically rooted, nationalist-worthy ways of using power, including the taking of lives. It also seems to imply that respect for state rule/nationalism would somehow reduce the nomadic resort to rootless violence. Most reductively, it makes multitudinous mujahidinism/Islamic fundamentalism a negative, unintended 'product' of Empire/globalism (though now we can see Strobe Talbot was a possible originator of the thesis) based on some very flimsy evidence (basically opinion by academics and journalists) and several atrocious events that people living in developed, highly policed countries can't 'explain' or even rationalize (though they can easily rationalize an all-out military attack on Iraq or state-sanctioned terrorism against Nicaragua or official regime change policies for isolated states like Cuba and N. Korea). By the way, how did American society make 'sense' of the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine massacre or the LA r
iots?
Western romanticizing of the 'Chechnyan cause' notwithstanding, should we now pretend the Russian military didn't level Grozny and kill a hundred thousand people or that the knowledge of what happened there couldn't have any 'rational' ideational effect on people who weren't there but somehow felt affected and desired to take revenge? Let's wait to find out more about who actually carried out the Beslan massacre. Hmmm...what makes me think it would be more convenient for most people not to know?
Fugazy
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