The record speaks for itself. This president has enabled a KGB thug to dismantle what nascent democratic institutions there existed in that country. A reader makes a convincing case:
The lack of any coherent administration response to Russia’s backsliding on democracy may not have caused the extremely dangerous mess that we’re now faced with, but it certainly exacerbated it. Over the past eight years, we have seen Russia’s nascent
democratic institutions systematically dismantled by the Putin government, while those who seek to resist this trend find themselves threatened, assaulted and even killed. Unfortunately, the thousands of brave democrats in Russia, whose work gives lie to the facile and condescending notion that the Russians are incapable of understanding democracy, cannot resist this well-organized, well-financed assault alone , any more than the Brezhnev-era dissidents were capable of bringing down the USSR on their own. They must have financial and – critically – moral support from outside if their struggle is to have any chance of succeeding.
Yet the Bush administration’s reaction has run the gamut from silence to inaction; neither Colin Powell nor Condoleezza Rice has ever issued a strong statement denouncing, without qualification, the Putin administration’s actions, and our ambassadors in Moscow have been decidedly conciliatory in their public statements. (The British ambassador, on the other hand, was brave enough to read a statement defending democracy at a conference this past summer, for which transgression he has been harassed by a Kremlin-directed mob for the past five months.) The Putin regime has been so emboldened by this silence as to attempt to assassinate a major politician, Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko, and as far as anyone can tell, is now doing hits in Western capitals using methods difficult to distinguish from nuclear terrorism. Our government and others must start issuing clear, consistent and forceful denunciations of this kind of behavior, backed up with credible threats of sanctions, if possible. If not, the Kremlin will conclude, with good reason, that we are willing to tolerate this kind of behavior in exchange for access to petroleum and natural gas.
(Photo: Dmitri Astakhovitar/Tass/AP.)
The Dish 