God forbid that we ever have a situation like the Moscow theater or the Beslan school in the United States.
I'll guarantee that we would also have similar loss of life.
And I will never stoop to the despicable level of blaming the heroes. I know who is to blame for both Beslan and the Moscow theater atrocities, and they are all Chechens.
Let's start with Mashkadov. Then we can go on to Shamil Besayev. Are you claiming that these are KGB (sic) operatives? Or that they are in the pay of Putin?
I don't happen to think that Putin is making a smart move with his pulling power to the center. It's not going to work and is anti-democratic. But to go from there to laying blame at his feet for things that properly belong at the feet of Mashkadov and Besayev is just- well, it's despicable.
People in this forum get pissed off at Bush for not doing things like blowing up a mosque where Al Sadr's (sp) militia are holed up.
He doesn't send the order in because while the short term results would be satisfactory, the long-term effects of blowing up mosques would be disastrous.
When Bush warned us that this would be a war unlike any war we've ever seen, and that it would be a long and difficult one, he wasn't simply engaging in rhetorical claptrap.
Putin needs to fight this war the same exact way that Bush is fighting it, with minimal loss of civilian life. Right now, in Chechnya, Putin has been fighting it in exactly the opposite manner.
The Moscow Theatre talking point came from here: http://www.marxist.com/Russia/moscow_chechen_attack.html
Talking point central.