--- Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
I think he was being sarcastic.
A gtand total of 28 soldiers were killed in Chechnya last year (I have no idea how many of the Chechen police* were). Those "Russia is caught in unending war in Chechnya" news articles that used to be churned out a few years ago read kind of funny today.
* Practically all of them former anti-Russian fighters, by the way. It's ironic -- the Chechen government is 100% ethnic Chechen, Grozny has near-total control over the republic's economy, and they pay no taxes. Almost as if it were an independent country, except that they can vote for the president and they get subsidized by Moscow. ;)
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com