Two, Three, Many Iraqs? Next: Chechnya

September 09, 2004

The Vietnam-era antiwar slogan might be adapted by the neocons: Two, three, many Iraqs. Obvious targets for a second-term Bush administration would be Iran, Syria and Sudan, all of which I’ve been following in this space. Now we add Chechnya.
 
Ignoring the literally fascist Islamic-terrorist regime that ran that unfortunate province in the 1990s, the neocons are targeting Chechnya for “independence.” Exactly why this silly mini-state deserves independence escapes me, but the neocons seem to feel that anything that weakens Russia (aka the USSR) is good for the United States. And leading the pack is—guess who?—Richard Perle. Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian  that pretty much says it all:

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.

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 Centre. 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.

This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the "war on terror".

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 Centre 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.

Today’s New York Times has a piece from Richard Pipes, a semi-retired neocon, who also backs the Chechen cause, in a piece called: “Give the Chechens a Land of Their Own.” Here’s an excerpt :

In his post-Beslan speech, Mr. Putin all but linked the attack to global Islam: "We have to admit that we have failed to recognize the complexity and dangerous nature of the processes taking place in our own country and the world in general." Reports that some of the terrorists were Arabs reinforce that line of thinking. But the fact is, the Chechen cause and that of Al Qaeda are quite different, and demand very different approaches in combating them.

Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness. The terrorists who blew up the train station in Madrid just before the Spanish election this year had a specific goal in mind: to compel the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Chechen case is, in some respects, analogous. A small group of Muslim people, the Chechens have been battling their Russian conquerors for centuries.

This is, of course, nonsense. It hardly matters what happened “centuries” ago. So, is Bush going to line up NATO support for liberating Chechyna, too?