Sunday, December 5, 2010

The Chechen War

I have a copy of a cable about that war here.

Besides the cable itself, what is kind of interesting is that the cable itself is in the "all caps" font of teletypes. But when I pasted it into the post, it was automajickally converted.

1 comment:

  1. Ah yes, you found the one that I read earlier. What is so interesting about this cable is that it says nothing -- zero,nada -- that anybody who was paying attention doesn't already know. It just boils it all down into one narrative. Putin probably had a belly laugh when he read it shortly after it hit the DoD data banks, years ago -- "they deign to tell me how to win in Chechnya? Let the morons win in Afghanistan, and then they'll have something to tell me!" -- but again, the only "secret" here is that America's diplomatic corps, while having unrealistic notions of what's possible via the sort of nation-building activities they advocate, is not as divorced from reality as their public pronouncements seem to make them.

    Reading this, I just scratch my head, "this is the kind of thing they're willing to shut down half the Internet to suppress?" Which makes me think that the contrived outrage against Wikileaks is sort of like the contrived outrage against Saddam Hussein back in 2003... just something ginned out of nowhere to do something that they already wanted to do anyhow. In this case, assert FSB err DHS control over the Internet via a) pressuring large U.S. Internet service providers into becoming arms of State Security, and b) test using the NSA's control of the DNS root servers in Virginia (via their front company, Verisign -- google "Ken Silva") to shut down web sites that various parties within the Soviet err U.S. government wanted shut down because they competed with the patrons of various corrupt officials within the Soviet err U.S. government.

    I guess the Soviet Union won the Cold War after all...

    -- Badtux the Sovok Penguin

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