From now on it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy:
Russian President Vladimir Putin told his country’s security services to find and kill the people responsible for the deaths of four Russian diplomats in Iraq.
Putin’s order will be posted on the presidential Web site later today, an official in the Kremlin’s press service said by telephone in Moscow, declining to be named.
You can’t get more official than a presidential order posted on a website in taking a position.
The diplomats were kidnapped in Baghdad on June 3 and a group linked to the al-Qaeda in Iraq organization posted a video on a Web site over the weekend purporting to show the killing of three of them, the Associated Press reported. In an accompanying statement, the Mujahedeen Shura Council, a collection of insurgent groups which includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, said the fourth man also was killed.
This is the video (WARNING IT IS GRAPHIC). MORE:
The deaths confirm “the view of Russia’s leadership and parliament that the forceful action of the U.S. and its allies in Iraq three years ago was a mistake,” Konstantin Kosachev, head of the International Relations Committee in the lower house of parliament, said yesterday on the Web site of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.
Two issues are at play here. One is Russia’s continued skepticism over the Iraq war (but some financial matters could have also played a part in the official stance on that and not just matters of propriety). The second is that terrorists may be enabled or even partly funded by certain nation states, but in general they operate outside of the international community. The find ’em and kill ’em so their ranks grow smaller approach is officially acknowledged here but this likely isn’t the first time a country has opted for this kind of response (Israel comes to mind).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.