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The U.S. government has demanded that nations and international bodies join forces to combat terrorism. Yet the United States has played an important role in fostering the very terrorism it now denounces. While terrorist groups are portrayed as an "evil enemies" by the United States, many terrorist organizations initially received considerable support from the U.S. government, either openly or clandestinely. From the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan to the Kosovo Liberation Army in the former Yugoslavia, the U.S. government has provided training and support to "terrorist" organizations. One of the best ways to combat terrorism in the world today is to pressure the United States and other governments to stop lending support to such organizations.
This is of particular importance for Russia, since terrorists originally armed and trained by the United States battled Soviet forces for over a decade in Afghanistan, and these Mujihadeen fighters can now be found in the Russian region of Chechnya. Not only has the U.S. support for the Mujihadeen resulted in considerable bloodshed in Chechnya, but the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan and the Russian Federation's war in Chechnya served to undermine efforts at democratization. My principal thesis in this article is that democracy cannot be instituted during war or under wartime conditions. In the United States own history, the periods when democracy was most threatened occurred during wartime. During the American Civil War, for example, many civil liberties were suspended. During World War I this was also the case, and right after the war the first "Red Scare" was instituted. World War II also saw strict limits on democratic rights, limitations that were repeated during the Viet Nam war.1
Of course in the history of Russia it has been during wartime that rights were most vigorously curtailed. During World War I no opposition voices were allowed, and with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 both the Reds and the Whites instituted a reign of terror that was justified by the reality of war. It was the threat of war that gave Stalin the excuse he needed to purge the Soviet Union of all of his opponents in the 1930s, and it was the cold war that gave Soviet leaders the justification for preventing democracy from breaking out. Thus, democracy...