PUTIN A “STALWART AGAINST TERRORISM”?

Commenting on President George W. Bush’s recent statement at the G-8 meetings in Canada that Russian President Putin “has been a stalwart in the fight against terror. He understands the threat of terror, because he has lived through terror,” journalist Fred Hiatt asked on the pages of the July 1 issue of the Washington Post: “‘[Putin] has lived through terror?’–what could that mean? Bush presumably was talking about Chechnya…. But if terror is, by definition, the harming of innocent civilians in order to frighten a larger population, then the chief terrorists in Russia today work for Putin; they are his soldiers and police. Bush understood this once.”