Glenn Greenwald on Thursday's brazen terrorist attack in Chechnya, the same day that Vladimir Putin was giving a big state of the nation speech --
That’s the nature of war. A country doesn’t get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it. Rather than being baffling or shocking, that reaction is completely natural and predictable. The only surprising thing about any of it is that it doesn’t happen more often.
Er, actually that's Greenwald on what was an apparent lone-wolf terrorist attack a couple of months in Quebec. He hasn't said anything about the latest Chechen spectacular.
Which is sort of interesting, because for all the analysis of Islamist terrorism which says that it's all just US foreign policy coming home to roost, the same theory applies ten times over to Russia. It was Russia as USSR which invaded Afghanistan, spawning the original Al Qaeda. And it was Putin's Russia which flattened Grozny -- twice! -- which sustained Chechen extremism, and it's not incidental that Chechens form an important element of ISIS. And who knows that fun is emerging from the petri dishes that Russia has created in eastern Ukraine and Syria now.
That’s the nature of war. A country doesn’t get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it. Rather than being baffling or shocking, that reaction is completely natural and predictable. The only surprising thing about any of it is that it doesn’t happen more often.
Er, actually that's Greenwald on what was an apparent lone-wolf terrorist attack a couple of months in Quebec. He hasn't said anything about the latest Chechen spectacular.
Which is sort of interesting, because for all the analysis of Islamist terrorism which says that it's all just US foreign policy coming home to roost, the same theory applies ten times over to Russia. It was Russia as USSR which invaded Afghanistan, spawning the original Al Qaeda. And it was Putin's Russia which flattened Grozny -- twice! -- which sustained Chechen extremism, and it's not incidental that Chechens form an important element of ISIS. And who knows that fun is emerging from the petri dishes that Russia has created in eastern Ukraine and Syria now.