We Are All Russians Now
POLITICS
We Are All Russians Now
Even American neocons were for Chechens before they were against them.
By David Weigel
Posted Monday, Apr 22, 2013, at 11:52 PM ET
If he’s paying attention to Washington right now, Russian President Vladimir Putin is discovering how quickly Americans can change their minds. One week ago, Putin was a vaguely menacing autocrat. Today, he’s a far-sighted ally who could have told us that the Tsarnaev brothers, two Muslims with roots in Chechnya, would be trouble. Jacob Heilbrunn has asked whether the bombings in Boston meant “vindication” for Putin. My colleague Fred Kaplan reported that “Russian intelligence services are all over Chechen radicals,” and speculated that “Boston may serve as an opportunity for these two powers to start over.”
Our sudden outbreak of Russophilia can be traced to one simple fact about the Boston investigation. In 2011, “a foreign government asked the FBI for information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” who’d arrived in the United States nearly 10 years earlier. (His brother arrived a little later.) The bureau complied. Finding nothing and later flummoxed by an airline’s clerical error, the United States allowed Tsarnaev to take a lengthy trip to Russia. On Monday, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wrote a letter to Senate leaders asking why “the current [immigration] system allows two individuals to immigrate to the United States from the Chechen Republic in Russia, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, who then committed acts of terrorism?”
Paul mangled some minor details of the story. The Tsarnaevs probably arrived in the United States from Kyrgyzstan, and their European relatives now live in the Russian republic of Dagestan. But that ...
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