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Showing posts from September, 2005

America's Inheritance in the Caucasus

This article, originally published by Antiwar.com on September 24, 2005, points out the difficulties the US will face as it seeks to take over control of Russia's strategic southern sphere of influence.While intervention is never praiseworthy, the one thing that can be said about international involvement in the Caucasus is that it has at least been fairly cosmopolitan, marked by a wide variety of voices and nations, and less prone to polarizing truisms than in, say, the Balkans, where the unchallenged ascendancy of the "Milosevic is guilty of everything" line has basically eliminated the possibility of a more nuanced discourse and contributed so much to the domination of US/EU single-track ideological rule.Indeed, as the Christian Science Monitor recently put it , "the region is a patchwork quilt of warring ethnic groups and rival religions that makes Europe's other tangled knot, the Balkans, look tame by comparison."At least with the Caucasus, one encounte