OxBlog

# Posted 5:20 PM by Patrick Belton

BRAVO TO THE WASH POST for having this to say about Russia's undemocratic efforts in Chechnya, and Russia's pure gall in comparing its operations there with US and allied opererations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Mr. Putin likes to compare the four-year-old Russian war against Chechens seeking independence with the U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; in a meeting with American journalists last weekend, he questioned whether U.S. forces were violating human rights on the streets of Baghdad. In fact the comparison is obscene. In Chechnya Russian troops have wiped out a democratically elected government, killed tens of thousands of civilians, forced others out of refugee camps and back into the war zone, reduced the capital and every major town to rubble, indiscriminately rounded up the entire male populations of dozens of villages for torture or summary execution and so shattered the country's civil society that previously marginal Islamic extremists now are a major force.

This war, remember, was launched purely to bolster Mr Putin's presidential ambitions. As the WashPost notes,

Putin was a strong opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and now he says he is skeptical of U.S. plans for reconstruction. Any political transition, he insists, must be endorsed by the United Nations and Arab states around Iraq. So we can only imagine what Mr. Putin's reaction would be if, during their scheduled meeting at Camp David this week, President Bush were to confide that his official plan to return Iraq to representative government was a mere facade. Mr. Bush might say that Iraq's constitution actually would be written in Washington so as to permanently require the presence of U.S. troops and political control and that the United States would select a presidential candidate who would be allowed to install his campaign manager as supervisor of all Iraqi media. If any serious challengers dared to take on Washington's favorite in a U.S.-run election, the White House would simply force them out of the race."

Well put.

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