(The New York Times) MOSCOW — Upon learning of the violent death of the United States ambassador to Libya on Wednesday, many Russians responded with variations on “I told you so.”
Russia has long argued that the West should not support popular
uprisings against dictatorships in the Middle East lest Islamic
fundamentalism take hold. Vladimir V. Putin, then serving as prime
minister, was especially enraged last fall after an angry crowd killed
his ally, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, an event he later condemned as a
“repulsive, disgusting” scene.
Since then, Russia has blocked Western initiatives to force Syria’s
president, Bashar al-Assad, from power despite a bloody crackdown on the
opposition. Russians’ responses to the storming of the American
Consulate in Benghazi underlined the deep policy divide. A prime-time
news report pointedly juxtaposed images of Ambassador J. Christopher
Stevens’s death with Colonel Qaddafi’s, pointing at their similarities,
then cut to footage of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
reacting to the Libyan leader’s death with a cursory “wow.”
Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Margelov said that passions had been
stoked by the uprisings and that they “splash out in the form of
terrorist acts or massacres of nonbelievers or an attack on embassies
and consulates.”
“The frequency of these outbursts, unfortunately, has been growing since
the ‘Arab Spring’ brought to power political groups of Islamic
orientation, either open or indirect,” Mr. Margelov said, in comments to
the Interfax news agency. A telegram from Foreign Minister Sergey V.
Lavrov to Mrs. Clinton condemned the attack as a crime, and said “it
confirms once again the necessity of combining the forces of our
countries and the whole international community to fight with the evil
of terrorism.”
But many commentators were far less diplomatic, especially on social
media. The first commentaries on Twitter were bitingly sarcastic — “The
democratized residents of Libya thanked the staff of the American
Embassy for its support,” one read. Another read, “This is what you call
exporting democracy, it seems. America gives Libya a revolution, and
Libyans, in return, kill the ambassador.” Aleksei K. Pushkov, the head
of Russia’s parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote via Twitter:
“Under Qaddafi they didn’t kill diplomats. Obama and Clinton are in
shock? What did they expect – ‘Democracy?’ Even bigger surprises await
them in Syria.”
Yevgeny Y. Satanovsky, president of the Institute of the Middle East in
Moscow, said American leaders should not expect “one word of sympathy”
from their Russian counterparts.
“It is a tragedy to the family of the poor ambassador, but his blood is
on the hands of Hillary Clinton personally and Barack Obama personally,”
Mr. Satanovsky said. He said Russian warnings against intervention in
the Middle East came from the bitter experience of the Soviets in
Afghanistan.
“You are the Soviet Union now, guys, and you pay the price,” he said.
“You are trying to distribute democracy the way we tried to distribute
socialism. You do it the Western way. They hate both.” He said dictators
were preferable to the constellation of armed forces that emerges when
they are unseated.
“They lynched Qaddafi — do you really think they will be thankful to
you?” he said. “They use stupid white people from a big rich and stupid
country which they really hate.”
Russia’s case against American involvement in the Middle East dates from
the post-Sept. 11 campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it has been at
the forefront of Russian discourse for at least a year, since Mr. Putin
broke out of his role as prime minister and delivered a passionate
criticism of the NATO bombing campaign in Libya, leaving the clear
impression that he — unlike his predecessor — would have used Russia’s
power in the United Nations to stop it.
Mr. Putin has dug his heels in on the issue of Syria, frustrating
Western hopes that he could persuade Mr. Assad to leave his post
voluntarily. Fyodor Lukyanov, a respected analyst and editor of Russia
in Global Affairs, said violence like Tuesday’s had been at the heart of
Russia’s warnings. He said Russia had formulated a “post-Communist
position: If you try to impose anything on others, as the Soviet Union
tried to do, the result will be the opposite, and disastrous.”
“This killing is just strengthening the views which are already quite
widespread — that the Western approach to the Arab Spring is basically
wrong,” Mr. Lukyanov said.
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