--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote: Frankly, I want Basaev to lose, but I think that the point in the previous e-mail was not about the Russians' entering of Chechnya. It was about the Russians' bloody tactics when dealing with hostage crises, tactics that didn't seem to involve care for the fate of the hostages:
>Talking about the Beslan and Nord-Ost terrorist
attacks, Basaev
pointed out that most of the hostages died because of
gas (in Moscow)
and flame throwers and tanks (in Beslan) used by
federal forces during
so-called "rescue operations" rather than because of
actions by his
men.<
---
Eliding over the fact that what happened in Beslan was not a special-operations rescue, but a chaos created by the heavily-armed relatives of the hostages (it's the Caucauses, where everybody has an automatic weapon, not Hollywood or Newark or London, and a macho moral imperative to vigilantism), what the fuck would have happened if nobody has intervened? Note that, again, after three days of deprivation of water children die. Would that have been better?
Taibbi wrote a great piece on Western analysis on the Dubrovka seige for the Russia Journal (when I was working there) called "Deskbound Hacks Spout Trenchant Analysis," which is no longer online sans an RJ subscription, in which he pointed out correctly that the seige was unprecedented in human history and that people spouting commentary on it were a bunch of ignoramouses.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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