#13 - RW 9-17-04 - RW Home
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004
From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Subject: The U.S. debate on the terror in Russia

The U.S. debate on the terror in Russia
By Ira Straus
Ira Straus is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, an independent international analysis organization dealing with NATO transformation and expansion. The views expressed in this article are entirely his own responsibility.

Discussion is still in its early stage in America on how much to support Russia in its confrontation with terrorism. The alternatives range from full support for Russia to full backing for the grievances of the terrorists against Russia. While very few are actually backing terrorism or justifying the hostage seizure per se, nevertheless it would be fair to say that, as a practical matter, the question is on the table as to which side the West should be on. And -- for the majority who prefer to be on Russia's side -- how much to do for it.

It is a necessary discussion. It has a lot in common with the discussion in Moscow after 9-11, when the entire elite debated which side Russia should be on -- whether Russia should support America against the terrorists, or should emphasize support for the grievances of the terrorists and others against America. In justification of the latter view, many in the Russian elite were prone to blame America for having caused the terrorism by its mistakes and crimes. And they had a great litany of well-known American mistakes and crimes to draw on -- well-known at least to Russian public discourse, even if some of them were imaginary.

Of course, the American debaters today have a litany of well-known Russian mistakes and crimes to draw on -- some of them also imaginary.

The structural similarities, to be sure, do not make the two debates necessarily equivalent substantively or morally. It is possible that Russia should have supported America but that America should not support Russia. Or vice versa.

There are in fact some differences. 9-11 was global terrorism without local objectives; the terrorism in Russia -- like the terror in Iraq, and like most Islamist or Islamic nationalist terror around the world -- is local terrorism in alliance with global terrorism and with primary attention to local objectives. The terrorist leaders appeal largely to different grievances in the two cases, with at most some overlap in the grievance-menu. However, it should be noted that the grievances are in themselves legitimate in both cases; it is more prejudice than reason that tends to view the grievances as valid only in one case, and as somehow justifying terrorism in that case. There may be ground for compromising with valid interests of offended populations in both cases, not just one; but in both cases, this needs to be calculated carefully, it risks being counterproductive, and if tried, it needs to be distinguished from compromising with the terrorist movements. And one should not imagine that eliminating a grievance will eliminate the terrorism; it will at most cut out one of the recruiting grounds for the terrorists.

In reality, everyone has grievances against everyone else, but few people use terrorism. The main terrorism in the world today is not coming from those who have the most to complain about -- the impoverished teeming masses of southern Asia and Africa -- but from those who have gained huge sums of unearned money off of an oil cartel at the expense of the rest of the world, and begun to fantasize about using this money to gain global power and reverse the verdict of half a millennium in which the leadership of the world passed to Christendom and its successors. Having prospered by injustice, some of them have dreamed dreams of greater triumph by greater injustice. This access of unjustly, socially unintegrated wealth -- not the grievances about injustices they themselves have suffered -- seems to be the relevant operative causal factor for explaining the power fantasies and the practical aggressiveness of a certain minority within the Islamic world. Thus its attempts at purchasing WMDs, thus its mass training of ethno-religious extremists, thus its readiness to seize on almost any grievance against non-Muslims in order to resort to war and terror.

In Chechnya, the grievances are assuredly real. But this does not in itself explain the terrorism. All kinds of ethnic groups have severe grievances against Russia; only one has engaged in both secessionist war and widespread terrorism. The well-funded diffusion of Wahhabi Islam has meanwhile led to scattered terrorist incidents among other Muslim ethnic groups in Russia, in association with some Chechens. The grievances of Black Muslims in America are no less real than those of Chechens, and even less remediable; thus far bin Laden has not embraced their cause and they have not -- apart perhaps from the D.C. sniper killers -- led to terrorism. Christian blacks in America, like Muslim blacks, have grievances as far-reaching as Chechens, but the option of terrorism does not even arise among them. British and American whites with an ideological attraction to anti-Western terrorism, such as the would-be shoe bomber, first convert to Islam, understood less as a theology than as an alternative group identity and a source of moral support for violent actions against their own society. The ideological and group power motivations of terrorism seem more accurate as explanatory categories than objective grievances.

The more one looks into the two debates -- Russians about supporting America, Americans about supporting Russia -- the more they seem similar in substance not just form. Perhaps the largest differences between them lie in their socio-political dynamics: The debate in Russia after 9-11 was the main issue for the entire political class and much of the population; the debate in America is smaller-scale, leaving a disproportionate role to elites that have specialized on Russia and its neighbors. There is cause to think that, in the outcome of the debate, America may fail to outgrow its old prejudices as much as Russia did in 2001, and may fail to come out nearly as strongly on the pro-Russian side as in 2001 Russia came out on pro-American side. Which would be, as Talleyrand once remarked, not just a crime -- it would be a blunder.

In Russia, it had required strong intervention from President Putin to overcome the propensity of the analysis community to keep regurgitating its old blame-American analyses, including the exaggerated and downright false ones that had become standard fare through repetition. Often no one seemed to know any better or to care to correct the falsehoods. Nevertheless, they stopped getting repeated after a certain period of time, and did not succeed in preventing strong Russian support for the American war against the Taliban and bin Laden; although some of them were left lying in wait for use on another day.

In America, we face all too similar a phenomena: anti-Russian nonsense turned into the public version of the truth by dint of repetition. After Beslan, a round of repetition of old shibboleths started up; no one knows whether they will finally be refuted in the public media (it seems unlikely at this stage), will continue to predominate, will be shunted to the side in favor of strong cooperation with Russia, or will simply be put aside for use on another day after serving the purpose of minimizing any new Western support for Russia at this time. Presidential leadership on thought-processes cannot be expected to be as effective here as in Russia. Here it is only the media and the analysis community themselves that can clean the cobwebs out of their minds. The prospects for this do not seem entirely good.

Inevitably in the course of this debate, some old conspiracy theories about the Chechen wars are coming up, some of them based on some inconclusive evidence, others based more simply on a will to believe that Russia or the KGB is the root cause of all evil. The point is to argue that the West should oppose Russia no matter how horrible the terrorism it faces, which are the fault of prior Russian crimes and might well be Russian-planned deceptions anyway.

This too has parallels to what was said by a portion of the Russian spectrum of discourse after 9-11 -- the ultra-nationalist portion, which saw 9-11 as a CIA plot to save the Bush presidency, or to give America an excuse to blow up its adversaries and strengthen its positions all around the world and tear apart the old world order and establish a world empire. Zhirinovsky initially saw a geopolitical opportunity for Russia to support the Taliban in their moment of need. Alexander Dugin plugged into the output of the American anti-American conspiracy theorists like Gore Vidal and Robert Anton Wilson and regurgitated the stuff for credulous domestic consumption.

Zhirinovsky turned around later and called for "stamping out" every trace of anti-Americanism in his party and in Russian society, so that all good people everywhere could unite against the terrorist threat to civilization. Somehow I have a hard time picturing comparable words ever being heard from such a prominent ultra in the anti-Russian cause in America.

Often the basic history of the second Chechen war takes an imaginary form in the Western media. Practically never is it traced to its actual starting point -- the invasion of Daghestan conducted by Chechen militant followers of Shamil Basayev. Usually instead it is traced to the Moscow apartment bombings, which came later. And then we are reminded that it is possible that the KGB itself blew up the apartments, in order to garner support for Putin and for the war.

There was, likewise, a negligence of sequence in the "history" propounded by many Russian media in 2001: America was said to have created the Taliban for the sake of fighting against the Soviet Union. Actually the Taliban movement was created by Pakistan around 1994; the Soviet Union had meanwhile long since left Afghanistan, and indeed left the entire planet earth. What was true was that the Taliban did win support from some of the forces that America had helped build up to fight the Soviets in the 1980s (while fighting against others of them), and the American government did more or less welcome the Taliban rise to power in the mid-'90s for reasons that were partly anti-Russian (there was a fantasy among Western elites that the way to promote democracy in the Caucasus and Central Asia was by "strengthening their independence" and reducing Russian influence in the region, to be achieved by a pipeline through a stable Russia-free Afghanistan). There would have been plenty to blame America for, without the falsified version of history.

Both America and Russia have committed plenty of mistakes; there is no need for exaggeration in describing them. The question is whether dwelling on them is the main thing needed in international life. America has more important business with Russia than the second-guessing of its every move; America today, like Russia in 2001, needs to rise above that kind of thing. It won't be able to do this, however, if it is thinking not in terms of Russia's actual mistakes but of an imagined-history version of them. In that case, Russia's faults get blown so far out of proportion that all sense of priority is lost, and it becomes hard to stomach the thought of serious cooperation with Russia even when faced with a mortal common enemy. In a time like the present moment, this can do harm to core U.S. interests.

If American elites may not do the job of correcting their own mistakes, is there any hope for Russia? The sense of betrayal, which was expressed sharply by Putin in his interview with American scholars and journalists, is widespread. However, there is more space for Russians to intervene in the American discussion than they may realize. There are many points of entry into the American media and the internet discussions. Russians of goodwill could make a difference in this discussion -- if, that is, they write in a generous spirit, avoid sinking into low-level polemics, answer mistaken versions of history and ignorance in a calm convincing way, focus on showing the sense of a collaborative approach rather than just complaining about America's lack of support for Russia, and don't cry too much about American doublestandards while forgetting their own. Objectivity and magnanimity are needed from Russians, too, if they hope to get it from Americans. The intervention needs to come above all from mainstream Russians who bear goodwill both toward their own country and toward America: people who are ready to look out for Russia's power and interests and to have a friendly regard for America's at the same time. These people should not abandon the field of representing their country in the American media to either embittered Russian nationalists or embittered Russian opponents of Russian power.

Perhaps fortunately, the discussion is not solely among elites. The U.S. President has come out strongly in solidarity with Russia in its hour of need. In this he has shown a sense of personal and national responsibility -- America's responsibility to be a reliable partner -- somewhat akin to that shown by the Russian President in 2001. He has also shown emotional intelligence, recognizing the need of the opposite society for empathy, not for arrogant, adversarial-toned lecturing, which some people always feel called upon to deliver. The Secretary of Defense has remarked that we don't give either terrorists or countries a free pass, at once parrying the facile accusation that we're giving Russia a free pass and suggesting that our elites should start fretting equally over the danger of giving the terrorists a free pass. Some in the State Department have continued to focus on lecturing Russia on the need for a negotiated settlement; the point is not necessarily wrong, but the tone is sometimes supercilious, given that it is far from obvious that there is any easy solution along this line, and that no attention is paid to the possibility that negotiations could become a trap legitimizing terrorist-connected forces (this is the substantive concern behind Putin's emotional objection to the double-standard from people who would not dream of calling for talks with bin Laden). Fortunately the Ambassador to Moscow has spoken in a broader vein, along the lines of the U.S. President -- that we stand shoulder to shoulder against terrorism and must do more together. This shows a sense of proportion and priorities.

In these conditions, it will not fall on deaf ears if there are analyses of the prospects for more effective cooperation of the two countries against terrorism. Such analyses may be helpful in providing the formulations and scenarios the governments need.

In 2001, in face of the shocking blows to America, the good sense of the Russian President led to a substantial ratcheting up of the level of Russia-West cooperation, which had never been pushed anywhere near its potential in the period after 1991. In 2004, the shocks to Russia could, if met with sufficient good sense from America, lead to a further ratcheting up of the cooperation. In that case, the deaths will not have been in vain.