| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Captain Compassion" |
| Date: |
27 Jul 2004 01:55:07 PM |
| Object: |
When Grozny comes to Fallujah |
SPENGLER
When Grozny comes to Fallujah
Do not be surprised to see three or four divisions of the Russian army
in the Sunni triangle before year-end, with an announcement just prior
to the US presidential election in November. Long rumored (or under
negotiation), a Russian deployment of 40,000 soldiers was predicted on
July 16 by the US intelligence site www.stratfor.com, and denied by
the Russian Foreign Ministry on July 20. Nonetheless, the logic is
compelling. Russian support for US occupation forces would make
scorched earth of Senator John Kerry's attack on the Bush
administration's foreign policy, namely its failure to form effective
alliances. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the chance to make
scorched earth of Fallujah is even more tempting.
In exchange for a troop presence in Iraq, Russia would obtain a free
hand in dealings with the countries of the former Soviet Union. It
would gain leverage against a weakening Turkey in the Caucasus and
Central Asia. And it would vastly enhance its leverage in negotiations
over the placement of oil pipelines. Most important, perhaps, it would
assert its old status as a global military power against the feckless
Europeans. In short, the arrangement would benefit everyone, except of
course the population of Fallujah.
America's squeamishness in the face of large-scale civilian casualties
mystifies the Russians, who know about such things. The remnants of
the Chechen resistance have few friends, even among Arab governments.
The General Assembly of the United Nations remained mute over the
Chechen dead when Russia razed Grozny in 1999, killing or displacing
about half of the population of 1 million. The Council of Europe,
responsible for investigating human rights violations, suspended
activity in Chechnya last year by agreement with Moscow. In January,
the Saudis received the pro-Russian president of Chechnya, Akhmad
Kadyrov, who told alJazeera, "I think the most important factor is
that Prince Abd Allah invited the leaders of the Chechen Republic.
This is a definite recognition of the current authorities [being]
friendly to Moscow."
Israel's apologists claim that world silence about Chechnya betrays
the hypocrisy of a world community that marshals the General Assembly
against the minor inconvenience of its defensive wall, but bites its
tongue before the mass destruction of Muslim life. Islam, however,
does not count lives the same way. More important than life itself is
the integrity of Islam's promise. A re-established Jewish state with
Jerusalem as its capital on territory won from the former Dar al-Islam
subverts Islam's promise, namely that it will supercede the false
teachings of Christian and Jew. That is a humiliation that transcends
the Muslim pain threshold, a dishonor too great to bear (see Horror
and humiliation in Fallujah, April 27). By contrast, no Muslim expects
an Islamic state to stand up to a power like Russia, even in its
senescence.
President George W Bush has mis-defined the mission of US forces to
the point that a deus ex machina (god from the machine) offers the
best way out. "We did not come here to fight these people, we came
here to free them," the commander of the 1st Marine Division told his
men after withdrawing from Fallujah in May, the New York Times
reported May 11. If the marines do not fight them, however, somebody
will have to. In a recent series, Asia Times Online correspondent Nir
Rosen reported on the surge in Islamist morale attendant on the US
retreat. There are only two ways to reduce irregular forces that use
the local civilian population as a shield. With sufficiently precise
intelligence, the Israelis have shown, it is possible to kill off a
sufficient number of leadership cadres to render the opposition
ineffective. Poor intelligence capacity eliminates that option in Iraq
(Why America is losing the intelligence war, November 11, 2003). The
other option is to pursue the enemy regardless of the cost in civilian
lives. Never have American ground forces done this. It is one thing to
annihilate Tokyo or Dresden from the air, and another to direct
artillery fire at civilian neighborhoods, as did the Russians in
Grozny. For Americans, the horror of such encounters is overwhelming.
Deploying proxy forces who lack this kind of compunction is the
obvious solution. Earlier I guessed (wrongly) that Washington would
avail itself of the 75,000-strong Kurdish militias - peshmergas - to
subdue the Sunni triangle. Turning the matter over to the Russians
would be a masterstroke. If the United States takes Russia on as a
partner in Iraq, as I predict, a profound change will ensue in US
policy toward the Muslim world. Both the Bill Clinton and Bush
administrations staked a great deal on support for Bosnian and Kosovar
Muslims, by way of showing that the US was willing to bomb Christians
in order to protect Muslims. In Russia's view, the US deliberately
provoked war with Serbia. Clinton's special ambassador Richard
Holbrooke, a likely secretary of state in a John Kerry administration,
delivered an ultimatum to former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic
at the February 1999 Rambouillet negotiations, with the intent of
provoking war, in the universally held Slavic view.
The bombardment of Serbia, Washington hoped, would establish its bona
fides among Muslims. "The terrorists we confront cannot deceive us by
attempting to wrap themselves in Islam's glorious mantle. Islam's
great leaders and scholars tell us otherwise. Our own history and
experience tell us otherwise. We helped defend Muslims in Kuwait. We
helped defend Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo," US Ambassador John
Negroponte told the United Nations General Assembly on October 1,
2001. Serbia was a cheap sacrifice. Except for Ivo Andric, who won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, no Serbian has won the attention
of world culture in half a century. Andric's derogatory portrayal of
Bosnian Muslims (written when Bosnia contributed a division to
Germany's Waffen SS) proscribes him from polite company today.
Devastated during both world wars and kept backward by communism,
Serbia had no friends in the West, apart from a tiny emigre community,
and poor capacity to tell its side of the story.
Whether one accepts the Slavic view of events or not, the Muslim world
turned up its nose at the Clinton administration's attempt to buy its
goodwill. The United States threatens the integrity of the Islamic
world not by its policy, but by its nature; the creative destruction
and cultural amnesia that define US society threaten to tear apart the
sinews of traditional Islamic life. Along with Holbrooke and former
secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Clinton's national security
adviser Samuel R Berger crafted this gambit gone awry. Berger's
present embarrassment about documents he allegedly stole from the
National Archives may have nothing to do with the prospective
Russian-US arrangement, but it may set the events of 1999 in a
different context. Allegations already are circulating in the media
that the Clinton administration arranged for Afghanistan-based jihadis
to travel to Kosovo in the service of the Albanian cause. One should
not take such rumors at face value, but they do suggest that the
Clinton administration's accommodative stance toward the Muslim world
may be subject to a nasty sort of dissection during the US
presidential election.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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'That ideological base (Kyoto) can be juxtaposed and compared with
man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to
deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism, Marxism,
Eugenics, Lysenkoism and so on. All methods of distorting information
existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity
of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology,
propaganda. Because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way
than myth, nonsense and absurdity.' - Andrei Illarionov Russian Economist
"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
res0mp8t@NOSPAMverizon.net
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