jbe, I appreciate your feelings about Chechnya. Your quotes of Clinton on the subject are indeed damning. But, it's the language of diplomacy, he's not the first, won't be the last to say stuff like that. I don't know what could have been done there (or still might be done there, even if the war is over I'm sure life is still grim in Chechnya).
I don't know how uniquely bad Chechnya is, though. Being a moderate bleeding heart, it was one of those stories I followed sadly until things become too grim. Sadly too, there have been far too many comparable stories. East Timor. Rwanda. Cambodia. Afghanistan. Bosnia. Bosnia eventually got some action from us, just because it was too much in the news. The others were remote enough in visibility to let the usual geopolitical factors dominate.
Going back a little further, a personal favorite is the Pakistan civil war and subsequent Indo-Pakistan war that lead to Bangladesh. We sided with Pakistan, mainly because Pakistan was Kissinger's secret conduit to China during negotiations over Nixon's China opening, as near as I can tell. That Kissinger, what a guy. Similarly, we sided with Iraq against Iran, poison gas and all, because, well, Iran held America hostage for 400 odd days, even if they didn't hurt anybody.
What to do? I couldn't guess. Russia in general seems hopeless enough to me, this odd form of "capitalism" evolving which seems halfway between anarchy and Mafia rule. I imagine many of the former Soviet Republics are even worse. Any American involvement beyond Russia itself seems driven only by commercial interests. Maybe George Soros can do some good, but I doubt it. By all indications, the businessmen are in general more likely to be former apparatciks(sp) than anything else.
It would be nice if we could develop a consistent, relatively impartial foreign policy where all countries understood that to partake in the global economy which the U.S. still dominates, certain standards need to be followed. The cold war is over, everybody wants to become rich, but old habits die hard. I'm not holding my breath for any new, clear thinking on the subject to emerge.
All I can say is I'm glad I live here, even with our messy and dishonest politics. It could be ever so much worse.
Cheers, Dan (well, sort of, writing about this kind of stuff beats the usual insults anyway. It's all Clinton's fault, you know.) |
