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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (2290)	3/24/2003 11:32:26 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 21614

From RUSSIA, but not with love...public opinion: Global Dispatches (page 2 of 14) From Russia Katrina vanden Heuvel Moscow thenation.com A few hours after the United States launched its first missiles against Baghdad, I spoke to 400 students and faculty at Moscow's largest university of commerce and economics. The mood in the packed hall was tense. My theme: the loyal opposition to war in America. The sharp questions came in rapid-fire sequence: Will this war destroy the United Nations? How can a democratically elected President wage an illegitimate war? Is America really a democracy? Why does the Bush Administration treat us like a province of the New American Empire? These students are Russia's westernized elite--the country's future leaders of commerce and business. Yet their anger at America was palpable, and expressed most vividly in the antiwar resolution they had drafted and unanimously adopted earlier that morning. "We demand an end to the war.... we demand the resignation of the Bush Administration, and the exile of George Bush and his family from the United States." It continued, "George Bush and his team of aggressors should be brought before an international tribunal and charged with crimes against humanity." The resolution was delivered by hand to Vladimir Putin that afternoon. While Russians overwhelmingly oppose the war--a poll taken yesterday shows that 71 percent view the US's actions as the greatest threat to world peace, 93 percent opposed the bombing of Iraq and positive opinion of the United States has fallen dramatically, from 68 percent to 28 percent in the last month--few Russians have taken to the streets to protest. On my way to the university, I saw what seemed to be the only demonstration in Moscow. Braving subzero temperatures, wind and snow, a small band of 500 people gathered across from the US Embassy waving banners and placards with slogans like--"Veto to War" and "USA--International Terrorist No. 1." A small group of schoolchildren later joined the demonstrators and sang a song written for the occasion: America parasha, pobeda budet nasiia, or "America is trash, victory will be ours." Russia's small public protests, compared with those in other world capitals, are a sign of people's apathy and alienation. "In the past several years," one of the organizers told me, "many have come to believe that street demonstrations are useless. They have done nothing to improve their lives, and most people believe the Kremlin doesn't care about public opinion. It's what we call 'managed democracy.'" "After all," he continued, "if people don't go out to protest against Russia's war in Chechnya, the cancer on our country's soul, why should they protest against America's war in Iraq?" Another Consequence of Bush's War Angered by war, the Russian Parliament put off voting on the US-Russian Arms Control Treaty, which the US Senate ratified earlier this month. Several deputies told me that the treaty's fate hinged on unfolding events in Iraq. Bush's Brezhnev Doctrine There are various opinions in Russia's media and among its political elite about the factors behind America's "imperial" war against Iraq. But one of the most startling for an American draws a sharp parallel with the former Soviet Union's behavior abroad. The Brezhnev Doctrine, as it was called from the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 until the rise of Gorbachev in 1985, asserted that countries in the Soviet orbit--primarily in Eastern Europe--had only "limited sovereignty," and therefore that Moscow alone had the right to decide the nature of those countries' political regimes. This was, it is pointed out here, an early version of Washington's current doctrine of pre-emptive war and regime change, and thus the talk in Moscow about "Bush's Brezhnev Doctrine." Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.