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To: COEXERJ145
"And there is deep morning in Europe as another "righteous freedom fighter" is murdered. /sarcasm"
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think couple years ago USA strong supported Chechens.
6 posted on 04/18/2004 1:54:07 PM PDT by Grzegorz 246
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To: Grzegorz 246; knighthawk
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think couple years ago USA strong supported Chechens.

Indirectly, there is some truth. Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union there was a conscious policy to woo muslims, we managed to pull Egypt out of the Soviet camp, for example, and we worked hard to try and draw Syria and Iraq away from them though not very successfully.

And we had a dream of using muslims to dismantle the Soviet Union, the idea was that if we could ever provoke a muslim insurrection the USSR would come apart at the seams. It all made perfect sense when we were at war with them.

This led to a big error, when we allowed the Shah of Iran to be replaced by the Ayatollah, believing that the Islamists would be more ruthlessly anti-communist. And it had one big success when we, with the Saudis and the Pakistanis, put together the Afghan insurgency that led to the Soviet defeat there.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union, it became possible to implement the policy when it no longer made any strategic sense. The Turks had their dream of uniting the Turkic countries of Central Asia, and the Saudis had their dream of building their Wahab empire, and since we were allies with both of them, we didn't oppose either of them.

Consequently, under Clinton, we steadfastly refused to say anything against the Chechens during their first revolt. Popular opinion began to shift after they won defacto independence and rather than build a real country, allowed their territory to be used for further war against the surrounding territories. But while Clinton was still in office, our official policy didn't change.

When Bush took office, his first foreign policy step was to embrace Putin, and that signaled the beginning of our pullback from support for the Chechens. 9/11 sealed it, and after 9/11 we declared war on every one of the Saudi insurrections across Asia and gave complete approval to Putin to do whatever he had to do in Chechnya. The only Saudi insurrection we did not attack was their outpost in the Balkans. We have sought to offload that to the Europeans, though.

It should be clear, though, that our "support" for the Chechens was rhetorical. They were a Turkish and Saudi operation, mostly Saudi after a time. And our patience for Saudi foolishness began to end with GW Bush's administration, and ended completely with 9/11 and their reluctance to help us either in Afghanistan or Iraq either one.

19 posted on 04/18/2004 4:02:36 PM PDT by marron
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To: Grzegorz 246
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think couple years ago USA strong supported Chechens

Yes, the Clinton adminstration did. But not Bush!
22 posted on 04/18/2004 5:47:38 PM PDT by zinochka (God bless President George Bush and Vladimir Putin!)
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