Okay, has Russia gone complete bat sh*t over the Chechen terrorist school attack?
Still, half of the people were Russian citizens.
And this
Too bad they don’t have the Russian branch of the NRA 
Anyway, is the War on Terror being used as an excuse to slip back into a dictatorship? What are the implications of having Russia enter the WoT with guns a blazing?
Mods, can you fix the title of this?
I should be: “The War On Terror, Russian style”
The Russians, unlike our government, are unafraid of being called politically-incorrect or anti-Muslim. They will give their Muslim terrorist fifth column what it so richly deserves, and what they will never get from America because we’re ruled by cowards.
You can call American leaders many things, but I don’t think “cowards” is justified. One crucial difference is that Russians have grown to expect/respect tough leadership whereas Americans believe in fair-play - at least at home.
How anyone could call the present US government afraid of taking action against Muslims, I have no idea. Unless you missed out (and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least given your oblivious arguments):
the last two wars the US government embarked on were precisely against Muslims. One of them was so poorly rationalized that the shit is still hitting the fan today and will continue to do so for quite a while; in the UN debates that the US ultimately rejected to go to war, they were even warned about engaging in what could become or would appear to the public as “clashes of civilizations”.
the US government trampled the Geneva Convention as well as the US Constitution in attempts to hold indefinitely without trial Muslim prisoners
the US government implemented profiling and screening of Muslims and Arabs, hardly a move that will draw approval from the PC crowd
US forces were found guilty of torturing and murdering Muslim prisoners in their care, with some inidcations suggesting senior complicity or at the very least lack of adequate control and refusals of responsibility
And so forth. Now, unless you are proposing that the US engage in the same totalitarian repressive (and counterproductive) behaviour that Putin’s Russia has adopted with Chechnya, please remember to engage brain before putting little activist typing fingers in drive.
Russia appears to have dropped the ball at the siege of Beslan. They are now trying to compensate for their previous ineptitude with these extreme measures, but if they don’t be careful they’ll just be making things a lot worse. The present broad crackdown reminds me of Milosevic’s response after the KLA took to murdering Serb policemen in Kosovo.
Ya. They had so many options, huh? :rolleyes:
People keep saying, ‘it could get worse’, et cetera. How so?
I mean, they took out a bunch of building in NYC, killing thousands, and took a school full of kids and shot the shit out them (to be fair, they did blow some of them up). Not to mention the one or two other terrorist attacks that have been carried out by Islamists. (Just one or two, I think!)
I don’t see how it could get any ‘worse’. Islamists will kill to the limits of their techinical ability to do so. Do you think they have WMD of some sort, and only their sense of decency keeps them from using them? What can get ‘worse’?
Which is sort of a telling situation, as when Kosovo was basically turned over to the KLA and Company, they went right back to killing Serbs (nuns and whatnot rather than police, but still…) Nice group of folks, those KLA. They were on our terrorist watch list, you know, until certain members of the administration realized that it was bad form to ally ourselves with terrorists.
And for the record, Russia did ‘pacify’ Chechnya before. Ya, it’ll probably earn Russia a stern rebuke from the UN these days, but they’ll turn to the old ways if their kids keep getting killed.
More accurately, they are persisting with the old ways, and it is causing their kids to be killed. Did you know that a large proportion of the suicide bombers in Russia lately are women whose husbands have been disappeared by the Russian security forces? I don’t believe this excuses their actions one whit, but it makes it rather hard to deny that Russia is largely causing its own problems with its oppressive actions, does it not? But no, you’ve fully bought in to Putin’s line that Chechnya is just one more front in fundamental Islam’s war on right-thinking people everywhere. Never mind that this is eminently false; never mind that it serves as a call to arms for Muslim extremists who previously never gave two hoots about Chechnya; as long as it justifies whatever happens to be the latest “anti-terrorist” measure, it bears repeating, I guess. Incidentally, other than a nameless FSB agent, was there any evidence that Arabs were among the terrorists? The survivors seem to have said they were mostly Chechens and Ingush.
I do agree with you on one point; it cannot get any worse than this. Chechnya is a wasteland, and 300 Russian children were recently murdered. This is as bad as it gets, assuming the entire region does not fall in to war. I only differ from you in that I find it painfully obvious that it is oppression which brought things to this point, and that more oppression will not bring peace back.
It does boggle my mind that some Americans can express such wholehearted enthusiasm for outright oppression. Russia is heading steadfastly back towards dictatorship - not merely in Chechnya but in general. 5,000 Russian citizens detained in the latest push, global restrictions on access to vehicles are being mooted, etc. etc. Even the Telegraph, which is the least lefty paper available in the UK save maybe the Daily Mail, acknowledges that these round-ups are typical Russian “do something, anything” responses. But according to PaulFitzroy this is “giving the terrorists fifth column what it so richly deserves”. Lord knows how; do you even have any evidence that these 10,000 detainees are Muslims, let along terrorist ones? How exactly is restricting the Russian populace’s access to cars intended to hamper people who blow themselves up on planes?
Here is another article on the latest Russian “reforms”, by the way.
A tiny minority will now. The fiercer the oppression, the greater the numbers who will do so in the future.
DO WE EVER LEARN ANYTHING?
Yes, such as actually having sufficient special forces and snipers in the area, setting up mobile hospitals for what they knew (given previous experience) was the inevitable outcome, and so forth.
For the rest, I find it amusing that you presume to tell me about these issues. Particularly since you seem to have missed my point entirely.
The Chechnya situation and regional problems will get worse, that was the whole goddamn reason for what appears to be al Qaeda involvement in this exercise: destablization. If the Russians embaescalate their broad and brutal crackdown, they will be playing straight into the arms of the people orchestrating these strategic attacks.
They’re not just carrying out these atrocities for the hell of it or to make a statement. There is a logic involved here that people like Putin had better take very seriously.
I keep this in for reasons of amusement. In case you really do need an answer, what al Qaeda is hoping here is extended conflicts and separatist developments to produce increasingly radicalized Muslim populations in the area, which they can then draw significant advantage from; AQ’s most likely plan is to prod Russia into employing more and more of the kind of techniques that Milosevic used against the Kosovar Albanians, which, as you saw, really did a lot of good for Milosevic (not to mention the Serbs!). Remember, after they essentially secured Kosovo (with the help of NATO) and ethnically cleansed mos Serbs out of their ancestral homeland, the KLA hopped across the border and tried to pull that exact same crap in Macedonia.
There is no NATO to rescue the Chechnyans, but this conflict is producing something even better for global terrorism: desperation and hopelessness, which equals more recruits, more resentment and propaganda, larger and more widespread terrorist networks, and the capacity to do even more harm.
And the point of this paragraph is…? by the way, my family actually lobbied against the idiocy of NATO riding to the KLA’s side, not that Piggy Albright and her disgusting little ilk driving that particular effort bothered to listen of course.
Good luck with that thinking.