Russia Profile June 2, 2006 How Does Chechnya Compare to Iraq? Introduced by Vladimir Frolov
Contributors: Nikolas Gvozdev, Andrei Lebedev, Anthony T. Salvia, Andrei Seregin, Sergei Shishkarev
The United States and its allies are getting increasingly bogged down in Iraq. Religious and ethnic violence continues unabated. Repeated guerrilla and terrorist attacks are exerting a heavy toll on American and Iraqi forces. More than 2,000 Americans have died in the war.
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An interesting article.
I especially appreciate the statement of the simple (but obscured in the Western media) fact that Moscow has managed to bring a good measure of (perhaps fragile) stability to Chechnya and has received no credit for its troubles.
Still, the authors go a bit off track when they analyze why the Russian and American experiences are so different.
Here is the key argument:
"It may sound strange that those who support a war in one locale whose ostensible purpose is to deal a blow to radical Islam, would oppose a different war in another locale being carried out for the same purpose. But then again, Putin’s objective has been the pragmatic one of short-circuiting the establishment of a radical Islamic caliphate in south and central Asia, whereas the Americans have other, grander and more complex priorities, including nothing less than advancing the interests of all of progressive humanity."
Leaving aside the authors' acceptance of high-flying American rhetoric about democratization there's another problem here: they neglect to mention that Russia's war in Chechnya was a local matter and, it can be persuasively argued, a *defensive* maneuver.
The United States had to go very far out of its way to reach out and smash Iraq a country that posed no threat to it whatsoever.
The Americans' failures can, at least partially, be explained as being a result of the lack of an achievable objective. Neither "democratizing the Middle East" nor creating a neo-colonial arrangement (the two alternative explanations offered by conventional and "radical" commentators respectively) are really feasible.
Moscow's goal, in contrast, was to neutralize a threat to its sovereign territory and to its citizens.
I can hardly imagine a starker difference.
.d.
--------- Necessitas ultimum et maximum telum est.
Livy