If someone asked for my advice, I might recommend a degree of regional autonomy with strict limits. Whatever arguments I have with official Turkish policies, Ankara has made some effort in recent years to accommodate legitimate Kurdish grievances and create some space for expressions of Kudish identity, provided that they do not cross over into agitation for independence, and that seems to be working in integrating Kurds more fully into Turkey. Greater decentralism when possible is my guiding rule, but I would add that nation-states need to be able to retain sovereignty over their territory and resist more extreme centrifugal tendencies that are encouraged by globalisation and the pull of ethnic nationalisms. Certainly, I think these states should endeavour to maintain full legal protections for their minorities, but how they go about that really is their concern.

The difference between perpetuating a foreign war that your government started and suppressing an insurrection within your own borders is a big one, and I regret if I minimised that difference in the course of making my argument.

“If anything, Beslan, the hostage-taking at the Moscow theater and the apartment bombings are all evidence of the terrible cost of persisting in a policy of occupation. Indeed, the Soviet experience after withdrawing from Afghanistan might have provided a model for Russian policy towards Chechnya.”

…end up sound awfully like advocacy of Chechen independence.

What are nations like Russia, Serbia or indeed Turkey to do with their “disaffected minority populations”? (I believe you often regard Turkey from an Armenian perspective) I imagine the palaeo-con view is “I don’t know but that’s their own damn business”.

Sometimes the answer is independence, despite the encouragement to violence it may give others. From my British perspective I’m certainly glad we let Ireland go when we did.

Withdrawal from that territory would probably lead to an end to terrorist attacks from *that* group, but it could encourage other separatists to follow the same path. When it is your own territory, issues of sovereignty are involved in a way that doesn’t apply with foreign deployments. One reason the Russians have been so adamant about Chechnya is that they don’t want other regions to get ideas about independence, so certainly the question of whether to abandon a territory is much less clear-cut when you have a large, multi-ethnic state with disaffected minority populations.

However, you go on to state that “these attacks … are, in fact, a result of continuing to control Chechnya. Had there been no Chechen war, and no brutal repression of Chechnya, none of those attacks would have happened in any case.” This is, as you know, a different proposition from arguing that the Soviets were foolish to invade Afghanistan, as it involves a movement for independence on Russian soil that did not result from a recent invasion. America has no violent native independence movements, but Russia, Serbia and many other nations do, of course.

How should Russia have responded to the demands for independence from a small Muslim region which harboured significant criminal activity? Your principled opposition to Kosovan independence stands in contrast to the suggestion that Russia should not have continued “to control Chechnya”. Should they have granted independence? Or are you arguing that it was the brutality of the Chechen war that was Russia’s mistake, and that the Chechens could have been handled better (and, by extension, the Kosovars) so that they would have accepted mere autonomy? Are comparisons between the two unwarranted?

You write: “The lesson seems clear: refusal to yield control of territory will result in terrorist acts, while withdrawal has no particularly noticeable after-effects…” Do you believe this applies when the territory in question is (arguably) your own?

Incorrect – And in fairness to McCain, I will correct you –

He graduated 894th out of 899 :)

The ill-fated George Armstrong Custer graduated dead last in his class at West Point, so perhaps that comparison is more apt for McCain.

It’s a feat of sorts to study the absolute least one can without being sent down, but is that a skill we require of the POTUS?

Everything in it is so over-the-top, so militantly and deliberately ignorant, that I can’t even focus on any given error. It all makes me think about more cosmic issues, like the fallen nature of man.

More specifically: if someone like Goldfarb, who presumably has a college education, has access to the Internet, and works at one of the most influential magazines in the world can squint hard enough to make all them bad furriners look the same…

… can you imagine what kinds of wild rumors about American intentions are widely believed among Iraqis?