Missing the Point

Two-thirds of the way through an assessment of the U.S. missile defence shield as "Russia's Red Herring" in negotiations with a Washington administration that is sometimes seen as slow to put two and two together where foreign policy issues - particularly Russia-related ones - are concerned, Robert Amsterdam writes:

Washington's failure to respond positively to Putin's unprecedented security cooperation following 9/11 will go down as the greatest wasted opportunity in recent history.

One wonders whether Washington - or indeed any other Western government professing to uphold the values of democracy and human rights - could have responded positively to "security" initiatives by a regime that engendered the documented massacres committed by its armed forces in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, and - it now seems probable - the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia which killed several hundred innocent civilians and served as a pretext for the opening of the second Russian military campaign in Chechnya.