ONE THING ABOUT THE "RUSSIAN 9-11"...:

Chechnya: Accept Reality (Samuel P. Huntington, 12/17/99, St. Petersburg Times)

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chechens quite predictably revolted again. And when they succeeded, defeating Russian armies in 1996 and achieving de facto independence, Russian nationalists quite predictably found this unacceptable and launched the current military campaign to subdue these obstinate mountain Muslims.

So what implications does the Chechen War have for Russia and the United States?

Almost everywhere in today's world, people are espousing cultural and civilizational identities. Multicivilizational states are increasingly being challenged, as in Serbia, and some, like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia, have come apart. [...]

[T]he age of multicivilizational empires is over, and Russia will be able to maintain its rule over Chechnya only at unsustainable costs. The next leader of Russia would do well to emulate Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's realism about the lost Turkish empire and espouse a Russian-only Russia rather than an obsolete dream of a multiethnic, multicivilizational empire.

The implications of the Chechen conflict for the United States are equally clear. Obviously, we have humanitarian concerns. But the United States does not have any significant national interests in Chechnya, while we have such interests in Russia. Thus, we can do little to punish Russia without imposing greater costs on ourselves.

Many foreign policy experts are saying that the United States should take several punitive steps against Russia to force it to ease up on Chechnya: linking suspension of loans from the International Monetary Fund to the end of the war; threatening exclusion from future meetings of the industrialized countries, and depressing the price of oil, if possible, to reduce Russian foreign exchange earnings. In the context of the moment, these ideas are almost ludicrous in their inconsequentiality.

The Chechen War is very popular with the Russian electorate and therefore popular with politicians running for office in this Sunday's parliamentary elections and next June's presidential elections. As long as the military appears to be succeeding, Russian politicians are not going to pull the army back because of Western wrist-slapping.

What we now see in Russia is the downside of electoral democracy: candidates competing with each other in appealing to nationalist sentiments. Even when Russia was clearly losing the war in 1996, it took the then commanding figure of Alexander Lebed to negotiate and sell to his government and people an agreement to withdraw from Chechnya.

The United States should deplore the humanitarian tragedy in Chechnya, but Clinton administration officials should also recognize that this conflict is 200 years old, and that it is one front among many in the contemporary global struggles between Muslim and non-Muslim peoples. In the long run, Russia cannot win this war, and the United States cannot significantly affect the outcome. The sooner statesmen accept these realities, the sooner peace will come to the North Caucasus.

no one has to ask: "Why do they hate us?"

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 8, 2004 4:22 PM