Though American politics seem to increasingly depend on a public display of memory so limited that clinicians might suspect chemical intervention, many citizens can still recall a time when Washington judged it worth the price of tens of thousands of American lives to save the people of South Vietnam from an imposed Communist regime.
That war was ill-considered. Nor do I generally find much on which to agree with Woodrow Wilson, who first espoused the doctrine that foreign peoples have a right to "self-determination," and that Americans have some duty to help.
Still, even if foreign military interventions often backfire, America was once proud to be "the arsenal of freedom." And while adherence to Wilson's doctrine has been spotty (one recalls with a shudder Franklin Roosevelt at Tehran, offering Stalin control over the fate of the peoples of Eastern Europe in the form of notes on a dinner napkin), most Americans are proud that we went to great lengths, just a generation ago, to make sure the people of France and the Philippines were "free to choose."
More recently, America's intervention in the former Yugoslavia has been justified on similar grounds, as was America's aid to the Afghan resistance in the 1980s.
So -- with Russia now many times weaker, both militarily and economically, than before the collapse of the Soviet empire -- why the curious reluctance to call a spade a spade in Chechnya?
The Chechen people are not Russian. By and large, they speak a different language from the people of Moscow; they are of different ethnic stock; they practice a different religion. Most importantly, hardly anyone believes the majority of Chechens (start ital)want(end ital) to be Russian.
The Russian army has been attempting to either conquer or occupy the mountains of the Caucasus for strategic reasons -- a buffer against Turkey; access to warm-water ports; the oil fields -- for at least 150 years. In 1944, Josef Stalin ordered the wholesale deportation of Chechens to Central Asia, leading to the deaths of a quarter of the population. During the last attempt at Russian conquest, from 1994-96, Chechen civilian deaths were variously estimated between 30,000 and 90,000.
Yet -- as the Red Army again invades tiny Chechnya, shelling its way across the land, killing civilians in the thousands and closing in on the capital of Grozny -- the wire reports in our American newspapers consistently describe the combatants as Russian "government forces," opposed by ill-organized "militants" or "rebels."
One might as well say that German "government forces" cleaned out isolated pockets of "rebel resistance" in Poland in 1939.
When did it become impossible in America to identify murderous Communist invaders as "murderous Communist invaders," or heroic freedom-fighters as "heroic freedom-fighters"?
"Russian troops have been destroying everything in their way," Mark Kramer wrote in The Los Angeles Times last week. "Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, whose public approval ratings have soared, has denounced the 'dark-skinned people' in Chechnya, whom Russian forces 'must annihilate.' ... Moscow's aim increasingly seems to be to eliminate the Chechens as a nation. Russia's campaign has become a war of extermination."
Russian military commanders last week offered a blunt ultimatum to the tens of thousands of civilians -- mainly elderly and the disabled -- who remained in Grozny: "There will be no more talks. Everyone who fails to leave the city (by Dec. 11) will be destroyed. Those staying in the city will be regarded as terrorists and bandits."
I can't recall Slobodan Milosevic -- not a nice guy, mind you, but a ruler who stands accused of "genocide" by Bill Clinton -- ever issuing such a public order.
On Dec. 9, responding to a curiously mild American call for "restraint" after Russian jets were reported bombing Chechen refugees as they tried to flee Grozny, Russia's chief drunk, Boris Yeltsin, did some saber rattling in Beijing, declaring: "It seems Mr. Clinton has forgotten Russia is a great power that possesses a nuclear arsenal. We aren't afraid at all of Clinton's anti-Russian position. ... I want to tell President Clinton that he alone cannot dictate how the world should live, work and play. It is us who will dictate."
Yet America continues to subsidize billions in International Monetary Fund loans to "bail out" the Russian economy (much of which gets transferred directly to the personal New York bank accounts of Moscow's ruling kleptocrats, while the rest, presumably, now buys artillery shells), and President Clinton continues to brag that "No nuclear missiles are now pointed" at America's babies as they sleep.
How cynical are Moscow's war aims? London international-relations analyst Eric Watkins reports for Bridge News that Russia's bombing campaign has focused on Chechnya's oil infrastructure -- including the old pipeline that runs through the heart of Grozny -- just to ensure the new pipeline which the Russians started laying through Dagestan in August "meets with no further competition."
Chechnya is a remote land. American "vital interests" there are minimal. Going to war there would be stupid.
But the same America which now finds cause to create de facto new nations in places like Kosovo -- considered an integral province of Serbia for 600 years -- would surely be free to at least recognize Chechnya as an independent nation, invite its representatives to canvass here for war-relief contributions, and authorize American arms manufacturers to gear up and sell the Chechens anything they can use.
So why don't we?
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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