Re: Three apartment blocks in Russian cities were destroyed by huge bombs that month...
That's quite an old story... 1999! If anything, the Beslan hostage crisis was even more outrageous --and barely five-month old:
September 2004: Images from the southern Russian town of Beslan, where more than 335 people, nearly half of them children, were killed when a siege came to a bloody end on September 3.
guardian.co.uk
Actually, the whole Russia-US-EU relationship reminds me of the following book: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (*) written by two Jewish-Canadian scholars, Messrs Leibovitz and Finkel... In the 1930s, the successive British PMs, Ramsay McDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain had to be cautious in their dealings with Hitler because of British public opinion: the official yet covert British policy was to give Germany --Nazi Germany, that is-- a free hand in Eastern and Central Europe AND ALSO a free hand at home! Nazi persecutions against political and ethnic minorities were deemed "domestic", "internal" matters that German authorities ought to handle as they saw fit....
Likewise, today, Bush, Blair and Chirac, Schroeder condone Russian atrocities committed against Chechnyans and other Caucasian minorities yet they won't blurt it... They merely pay lip service to "human rights" and hope for a peaceful, political settlement...
Re: Russia has refused to cut its support for Iran’s nuclear power projects despite all of Washington’s blandishments.
Again, that's no brinkmanship on Russia's part! The Kremlin is well aware of which way the diplomatic wind is blowing --I mean, who's isolated in the Iranian crisis? Is it Russia or is it the US? It's not like Russia is ALONE siding by Iran against the world! US officials keep blathering about the "world's united stand against Iran's nuclear scheme" but so far, the US is completely isolated in its anti-Iranian, pro-Israel warmongering. As for Russia's overt help to Iran's nuclear reactor, let's not be fooled: China's $100 billion and India's $40 billion commitments are much, much stronger pledges of support than Russia's. As I said, Putin merely hid his geopolitical decrepitude behind a face-saver....
Re: But most of the world’s other major powers are starting to see the United States as a rogue state, and gradually they are responding to that perception.
That's right. The US is sort of a modern Weimar Germany whose growing restlessness poses a global threat.... Somehow, it seems to me that the US increasingly needs to wage war ABROAD in order to avoid war AT HOME. After all, for all its achievements in high-tech, GDP growth,... the US fabric is still fraught with deep tensions --there's a cultural war going on for the past 10-15 years that overlaps with the race/minorities issue. The OKC bombing was a wakeup call of sorts: the worst terrorist attack perpetrated in the US by true-born US citizens. And here's the dirty little secret about it: Republicans, especially far-rightist ones, were deeply frustrated at the way the Clinton/Democratic administration dealt with the OKC bombing. Indeed, Clinton didn't conceal the real, AMERICAN identities of the terrorists (McVeigh, Nichols et alii) and that was viewed as a treason by GOP uber-patriots... Clinton, in their eyes, was a traitor because he didn't frame some ugly Arabs as the OKC terrorists --Clinton opened the door to (a second) civil war in the US! Hence the Judeocon plot to conjure up an ALIEN enemy: al qaeda, bin laden, zarqawi, etc. The rest is history --and an escapist war in Iraq.
Gus
(*) amazon.com |
