World gives Russia an unfair rap - by Gregory Clark
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is an intelligent woman. So how can she possibly want to tell the world that Russia's response to the Georgian attack on South Ossetia resembled the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The comparisons should be the reverse. The Russian willingness to go to the aid of a small region under brutal attack contrasts greatly with the empty Western rhetoric back in the days when Czechoslovakia or other regions were under Moscow attack. And the knee-jerk anti-Russian reactions of the media and other commentators too biased or lazy to question the official U.S. version of events parallels the Russian media's knee-jerk acceptance of Moscow's distorted explanations for past misdemeanors such as Chechnya.
U.S. President George W. Bush condemns the Russian attack as a violation of Georgian sovereignty. Did sovereignty concerns ever bother the United States during its attacks on various nations? Besides, we now have doctrines that say nations have moral obligations to intervene to defend peoples under immoral attack, regardless of sovereignty concerns. The Russians could easily claim that in Ossetia. The Russians are right to use the Kosovo example as a proof of Western hypocrisy. There, too, the Serbian minority population was under attack from Western-backed Albanian guerrillas. Serbian attempts to stop the attacks were amazingly described as Serbian ethnic cleansing.
No comments:
Post a Comment