After resolution 1441, I decided to poke my head out of American and British news and pay attention to some of the Islamic news agencies. After all, these are the people whose "hearts and minds" the US is trying to win over.
However, it wasn't until recently that I started keeping up with a Russian news source:
http://www.gazeta.ru/english/ I don't know if the Gazeta is considered one of the more conservative or liberal agencies in Russia but after reading through it now for about a week, I realize something... Had the United States lost the cold war and Russia was the only remaining superpower working alongside China, I would feel that I was under threat of hegemony as well.
Russia is a nation that still has a lot of pride left in it, and that's not a bad thing. Sure there's a good deal of anti-American sentiment there, but that's understandable. Russia wants a culture that people look up to, an economy that has a powerful global reach, and a military that makes them secure from the chaotic whims of world events. They had that once and a lot of them still remember that.
I'm not about to say that I understand the Russian condition or agree with many of their policies, but until recently, I thought that Boroda and his russian cohorts were just a bunch of *******s. I think we may have more in common than we give them credit for (hell, Gazeta makes as much fun of the French as OUR news agencies do)
