Washington neocons, The Chechens' American Friends (wow)

[G_j]

-no fan of Putin here, but this sure is interesting....


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0908-01.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5010448-103610,00.html
Published on Wednesday, September 8, 2004 by the Guardian/UK

The Chechens' American Friends
The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own

by John Laughland

An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia. Soundbites and headlines such as "Grief turns to anger", "Harsh words for government", and "Criticism mounting against Putin" have abounded, while TV and radio correspondents in Beslan have been pressed on air to say that the people there blame Moscow as much as the terrorists. There have been numerous editorials encouraging us to understand - to quote the Sunday Times - the "underlying causes" of Chechen terrorism (usually Russian authoritarianism), while the widespread use of the word "rebels" to describe people who shoot children shows a surprising indulgence in the face of extreme brutality.

On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called "mounting criticism" is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum - and by its American supporters. The leading Russian critics of Putin's handling of the Beslan crisis are the pro-US politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov - men associated with the extreme neoliberal market reforms which so devastated the Russian economy under the west's beloved Boris Yeltsin - and the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Center. Funded by its New York head office, this influential thinktank - which operates in tandem with the military-political Rand Corporation, for instance in producing policy papers on Russia's role in helping the US restructure the "Greater Middle East" - has been quoted repeatedly in recent days blaming Putin for the Chechen atrocities. The centre has also been assiduous over recent months in arguing against Moscow's claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al-Qaida.
<snip>

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Center for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on NATO; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasizing the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilize the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration
..more..

[russian33]

1. Thanks for the article, very interesting...not really surprising

[Liberal Veteran]

2. You mean there are good terrorists and bad terrorists?

So are we fighting a war on terror or a war on bad terrorists?

[JHB]

4. No, there's bigger Russia and smaller Russia...

As with everything, arguments about terrorism and democracy are just window dressing, smokescreens for the neocons real goals, which involve creating an overwhelming "American Hegemony" by hook or by crook (and preferably the latter, since it's not a proper hegemony in their minds if you can't make the lesser entities bark on command).

Every piece of the former Soviet empire that is broken off makes Russia that much smaller and gives it one more complication to interfere with any new ambitions. And it puts the Russians that much farther away from "interfereing" with the neocons Middle East ambitions.

On Edit: as pointed out below, that should be "former Russian/Soviet empire", since the annexation of Chechnya happened under the Tsars.

[htuttle]

5. Chechnya is really not part of the 'former Soviet Empire'

It's been part of Russia since 1858, about 40 years before the US annexed Hawaii by force.

Just saying.

[hlthe2b]

3. So, the Administration backs "child murderers?"

Yes, I know the situation is complicated, but nonetheless, this is an awkward soundbyte for them!

Sadly, the Russian people, the Chechen people, and the American people are all pawns in this geopolitical game of oil-fueled chess.

[democracy eh]

6. kick

good read

[moondust]

7. Lining up against Putin.

Despite the fact that Freedom Fighters do not slaughter children.

Perhaps this nickel-and-dime terrorism may not be a large and durable enough enemy to keep the mammoth ovens of the military-industrial complex well stoked and their owners rolling in dough. Can't use China and endanger the cheap labor pool. So who else has a navy and nukes and all that scary stuff that propped up the Cold War and hard-liners for decades? Hmmmm......

[Aidoneus]

8. I applaud their hypocritical stance, even as I work against them

bastards that they are, at least the proper stance in spirit is taken, even if it is of course for the wrong reasons and astride brazen hypocrisy. ChRI Foreign Minister Akhmadov should be granted a safe

Now, there are some matters tied to this that certain mistaken and knee-jerk reactions are popping up here in response. With regards to ChRI Foreign Minister Ilyas Akhmadov, I would advise first knowing who he is before you accept the supreme butchers' arguments about him as a "terrorist". The truth is in fact so far from the case.

This is the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya (ChRI) Foreign Ministry's website. Note that the first two entries are official condemnations of the events in Beslan. Akhmadov often condemns Basayev for merely waking up in the morning, so that cannot be any surprise.

Over at ChechenPress there are several official statements by ChRI President and Commander of ChRI Armed Forces Aslan Maskhadov himself and his official Representative Akhmad Zakayev, both strongly disgusted by the matter. They were actually contacted for the task of negotiating a safe end to this with those inside before a series of accidents triggered the unintended course of concluding events.

As for me, thankfully the coinciding stances on this between myself and the pack of neocon jackals are only slight. While these people are hypocrites and much of the true statements they make of Putin's gang are just as true about themselves, I make no secret of my support of the resistance movements (under a variety of definitions of both these and the term before it) from all over the world, including several in Occupied Iraq.

[allemand]

9. Caveat: John Laughland also called Kerry "more of a warmonger than Bush"

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,9328751,00.html

Laughland did a highly sympathetic interview with Jean-Marie Le Pen.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/laughland1.html

Here you can find some more links to his extremist views:
http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002269.html

All this doesn't mean that he isn't right about the neocons and their interests to use the Chechen conflict in order to weaken the influence of Russia in that region, but it would be an error to reduce the conflict to that dimension (or to the dimension of international terrorism, for that matter).

"Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, 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."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5010448-103610,00.html

It is also the viewpoint of the European Union that there can be only a political solution to the conflict, and the neocons don't have many friends among the Europeans.

Not all Chechens are terrorists, and I don't think that the U.S. government and the EU demand from Russia to negotiate with any terrorist group, but only with those Chechen groups that denounce terrorism.
Don't forget that a solution to the Chechen problem is against the interests of the neocons because it would strengthen Russia.