Putin the Peacemaker [View all]

[BridgeTheGap]

The Washington know-it-alls are all atwitter over Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op ed: their outrage is the best endorsement.

All the Very Serious People are up in arms over the "hypocrisy" of the Russian leader for taking the US to task for rushing to war in Syria. It was the timing that rankled them: the foreign policy cognoscenti have only just barely gotten over their palpable disappointment when Congress and then the President backed down in the face of vocal outrage emanating from out in the cornfields. And now this!

If the revolt of the hoi polloi depresses them – how dare those un-lettered ruffians in flyover country interfere with their fun (and their career plans)! – the decision by the editors of the Times to publish Putin energized their moral preening instinct and reconfirmed their conviction that they represent humankind’s last best hope. They point to Putin’s 1999 Times op Ed – yes, this is his second – wherein he purported to explain Russian intervention in Chechnya – what hypocrisy, they cry! Of course, many on Twitter made the mistake of actually linking to this piece, in which Putin presciently speculated that Islamist radicals might one day attack the United States:

"I ask you to put aside for a moment the dramatic news reports from the Caucasus and imagine something more placid: ordinary New Yorkers or Washingtonians, asleep in their homes. Then, in a flash, hundreds perish in explosions at the Watergate, or at an apartment complex on Manhattan’s West Side. Thousands are injured, some horribly disfigured. Panic engulfs a neighborhood, then a nation."

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/09/12/putin-the-peacemaker-2/