Behold The Mind Of A Champion Doublethinker

In a three-hour interview Saturday, Russia's big cheese, Vladimir Putin, chided the United States for its invasion of Iraq: "How would the local population treat forces whose official name is the occupying forces?"

Contrariwise, he in another section of the interview, while making sure to laud Dubya's "courageous" defence of his exceedingly brutal war upon Chechnya, at the same time decried the crticisms of Russia's Chechnya policy offered up by other American "agencies and ministries".

Interestingly, he was correctly able to detect the existence of a double-standard here, viz., that "Islamic fighters in Chechnya were called democrats, while those in Afghanistan and Iraq were viewed as criminals."

Okay, but finding the Bush Administration guilty of utilising double-standards is like finding the ocean guilty of being wet. True enough, but hardly Earth-shattering news.

Rather than touching the match to this driest of straw men, he might care to note that 80% or more of the world's population was opposed to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and 90% or more was opposed to the invasion of Iraq -- consistent with his Chechnya policy's status as an "open sore in Russia's standing in the world".

Putin can, after all, "boast" of having sentenced innocent civilians to suffer casualty and internal-displacement levels commensurate with those of U.S. client regimes in Turkey, Colombia, and Indonesia during the same period -- though not quite in the same league as the United States' own obliteration of Iraq during the '90s.

Let's call a spade a spade, eh, Vlad?

Posted by Eddie Tews at October 6, 2003 04:36 PM