Using Beslan to defend war on terror
Chechnya is an occupied, mostly Muslim nation, critical to the stability of the region, where as many as 200,000 people may have been killed or driven out, where cities have been reduced to rubble, and where oil flows, or would flow if the place hadn't been wrecked.
Of course, the situation in Chechnya is far worse than in Iraq. The ugly events of Abu Ghraib aside, it's not likely that U.S. troops will ever stoop to the atrocities perpetuated on Chechens, many of whom ended up gang-raped, hacked to pieces and in mass graves.
But the basic outlines — invasion, occupation and exploitation — are there.
Watching the coverage on U.S. TV, it has been breathtaking to see the lack of depth and context provided.
Tuesday night on CNN, Anderson Cooper conducted a panel discussion with military intelligence analyst Ken Robinson and Moscow bureau chief Jill Dougherty that went on and on about the shocking video from inside the school, with speculative details on the nature of the bombs, but not one word about what this was all about.
Typical.
It was as if the networks were thinking only in terms of what this could mean for Americans, but without daring to examine the root causes of such actions for fear of — what? — appearing liberal.
Even when Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld invoked Beslan to defend the Pentagon's actions in Iraq and Vice-President Dick Cheney said that the "wrong choice" on the coming election day could mean that terrorists will "hit" the States again, the cable hairdos fluffed over the obvious.
Understand: There is absolutely no justification for taking innocent people, not to mention children, hostage, holding them in stifling heat, without food, water or bathroom privileges while waving bombs and sticking bayonets in them.
But it's not all simply about, as Diane Francis put it on Tuesday, "a crazed Islamist guerrilla army bent on destabilizing, frightening and destroying all non-believers."
As the New York Times' Paul Krugman wrote, "Step by step, the fight against Al Qaeda became a universal `war on terror,' then a confrontation with the `axis of evil,' then a war against all evil everywhere. Nobody knows where it all ends."
Maybe when the opportunistic scaremongering stops.
thestar.com |
