The Neocons' Role
For over a decade, U.S. policy has been to criticize Russian actions against Chechen and Ingush rebels, while discouraging Russian support for all three separatist movements in Georgia. In 1999, many key players in the current administration formed an "American Committee for Peace in Chechnya" (ACPC), whose membership roster includes omnipresent neocon operator Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Elliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Frank Gaffney, Glen Howard, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Bruce Jackson, James Woolsey, and Caspar Weinberger. Since 9-11, while insisting on al-Qaeda links to Muslim terrorism everywhere else (from the Philippines to Palestine), they have pronounced any Chechen-al-Qaeda link "overstated." ACPC has successfully campaigned for the U.S. to provide political asylum to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in Maskhadov's toppled regime and considered a terrorist by Moscow. Bush policy was expressed by Steven Pifer, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, in an appearance before the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2003: "[We] do not share the Russian assessment that the Chechen conflict is simply and solely a counterterrorism effort. . . . While there are terrorist elements fighting in Chechnya, we do not agree that all separatists can be equated as terrorists." According to John Laughland in the Guardian (Sept. 8), "US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere." Putin's Chechnya war, that is to say, is not, as the Russian leader wants to paint it, part and parcel of the global War on Terrorism initially focused on al-Qaeda. It is an ongoing statement of Russia's still-brutal, dictatorial character, and hence an encouragement for the Caucasian nations to strengthen ties with the U.S.
While seeking regime change throughout the Muslim Middle East, inventing facts to achieve that end, the Bush administration (pleased with the new U.S.-educated president Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, which it helped place in power; pleased to have military forces training troops in Azerbaijan; grateful to Armenia for its 50 troops in Iraq; planning on bringing these all into NATO) wants the status quo in the southern Caucasus (except for the remaining Russian bases in Georgia, which it wants to replace with its own). It also desires the advance of Muslim separatism in the northern (Russian) Caucasus. Should southern Russia decompose into a series of small, weak nations (from Daghestan to Karachayevo-Cherkessia), this part of Muslim Europe will fall firmly into the U.S. lap, terrorizing nobody and happily cooperating with U.S. energy corporations. This, at least, is the neocon hope, which is why they so embrace, even after the Beslan attack, what they imagine to be the Chechen cause. Meanwhile Moscow, repressing Muslim separatism at home, courts Muslim separatists in Georgia's Adzharia and Abhkazia. Thus the main issue in the Caucasus is not Islam, or Chechen terrorism, but geopolitical control, with the U.S. and Russia competing to depict their competition as a War on Terror.
Subject: [lbo-talk] Counterpunch Fruit Leupps on Chechnya From: Michael Pugliese <michael098762001 at earthlink.net> Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:35:17 -0700 (GMT-07:00) To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp09142004.html Checking the archives I see that Mike Larkin pointed out a MR piece by Leupp defending the Sandero Luminoso. Who had a penchant for killing lesbians and leftists, I mean social fascists.
Michael Pugliese