The original caricature was done by the very talented artist Ismael Roldan
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
The Other Russia
The man who would checkmate Vladimir Putin.
BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
Saturday, January 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
NEW YORK–As the longtime world chess champion, Garry Kasparov was a famously aggressive player. His latest game is politics, and his style is equally aggressive. “Our goal is to dismantle the regime,” he says, speaking of the political coalition he leads to bring down Vladimir Putin.
…Mr. Kasparov gives a wry smile. “I think the best thing [the U.S.] could have done was to get Saddam [Hussein] 15 years earlier,” he says. “By going after Saddam in 1991, I think we could have saved Yugoslavia from a civil war and could have sent a message, a very powerful message, to many dictators. . . . In 1991, the United States was much stronger and everybody else was much weaker.”
The decision to let Saddam stay in power happened under the watch of President George H.W. Bush, whom Mr. Kasparov isn’t shy about criticizing. But he’s far more scathing about President Bill Clinton. “During the Clinton years, the United States did virtually nothing in the international arena. . . .
The full article can be read here.
Here is a poll that was done by a blogger. Click http://poll.pollcode.com/hjUc to vote:
Choices
* I like to see him promote chess and help our chess community
* He has done enough damage to chess, let him go into Russian politics
* I do not care either way
* Who is Kasparov?
Susan,
There is no caption in the picture in the Wall Street Journal. I have a paper version and it is in the linked article as well. The article is not about chess and the use of Photoshop is placing the picture out of the context of the article.
Nice article Susan just the way you presented it.
I would delete the posting above.
Kasparov is absolutely right.
To not take out Saddam Hussein in 1991, in the situation when it would have been so easy to do so, has to stand as one of the dumbest decisions ever.
And if Bill Clinton had got his a into g (instead of having another part of his anatomy somewhere else), Russia would be a much better place than it is today. The USA missed a golden opportunity in that period, the like of which will probably never return.
If for no other reason, Putin is bad news because he is supplying Iran with dangerous weapons and aiding its nuclear ambitions.
First,
I’m afraid we won’t see Mr. Kasparov promoting chess anytime soon.
Here is the end of the very last paragraph of the article.
But at least for now, politics has taken the place of chess as the big game in his life: “I just don’t see any other choice for me,” he says. “As I used to say for 25 years, I am defending the colors of my country. I’m still doing the same, just not at the chessboard. At a much larger board.”
So then, what’s the point of the poll and the funny choices?
Second,
The article is not about Mr. Kasparov’s retirement from chess (the fact is just mentioned)
and the original cartoon has no caption (pointed out by Anonymous… January 27, 2007 11:13:00 PM)
More than that, the original cartoon is copyrighted by Ismael Roldan.
Strangely, his name disappears on the modified version we see on this site.
Istead, we can enjoy an added caption that claims something not related to the article.
(if at all true)
My two questions are.
Is Mr. Ismael Roldan aware of these modifications and does he approve?
Is Mr. Kasparov aware of the way his name is used and does he approve?
Sorry. An aspiring statesman does not make that sort of comment regarding the foreign policy of another country.
Anyone got any idea, why the Americans did not march all the way to Baghdad in ’92 ?
Yugoslavia was ment to destroy it-self one way or another … after the death of Tito there was not enough political power to hold it together and I think that was for the better. (the best case scenario wuld be for yugoslavia to fall apart without a war but I think there was simply no way this culd have hapened)
Peter, 1991 it was.
It was an order from Bush not to.
I understand he thought it would destabilise Iraq, and that this wasn’t worth it! (As if Saddam hadn’t been destabilising the whole region for the last decade!) Perhaps it was a carryover of America’s very misguided support of Iraq in the 1980-8 war with Iran.
Bush used the lame excuse that it wasn’t part of the United Nations mandate, even though Saddam had thoroughly broken United Nations rules by invading Kuwait. Bush’s action was about equivalent to in World War 2 if the allies had stopped on the borders of Germany at the end of 1944 and not punished Hitler for invading Poland.
mirta,
I agree. Poor choices available. In the end I had to vote for the Kasparov helping chess option, even though I didn’t really agree with it, so as to counter the anti-Kasparov vote.
On the chessboard of life, the Bush family have made things far worse, than before they came along.
George HW Bush failed in Iraq, and his son George W. Bush is doing likewise, only this time the situation has been exacerbated and will have some nasty repercussions for future generations, and may in the long run, never be resolved. Had the President, not deviated from his course, and kept after Osama Bin Laden and his gang the Al Qaeda, until they were completely dealt with, instead of diverting his military’s energy by creating a preemptive war with Iraq, he would have nipped the problem in the bud.
As it is, he’s inflamed the passions of the entire muslim community, and made a martyr out of Saddam, and a saint out of Osama, while spending the entire treasury dry, leaving the United States of America at China’s mercy, as they hold on to the debt deficit markers. Recently China blew a satellite out of the sky, and this has the entire US military weapons in space program in a tizzy.
Bush is a bumbling idiot, and the biggest failure and worst President ever in the history of the United States. He leaves a sad legacy, he leaves America, totally disconnected from the rest of the world and all reality. Clinton may have got his rocks off, but he looks like a Saint beside this fool of a President. An analyzed IQ test of the President’s IQ’s showed George W. Bush at 91, and his father at 93, while it showed Bill Clinton’s as 180, if that alone doesn’t tell a story, I don’t know what will.
Randy
I read somewhere, that the reason the Iraq war was not finished in a legal fashion, was because Isreal did not want a UN sponsored war to be finished in a tidy fashion ie. To establish a precedent of International law running affairs. Isreal has been breaking UN resolutions for many years. The other reason Isreal did not want the Iraq to be finished in a tidy fashion was Iraq would have elected a Shiite president, the majority of Iraqies are Shiite thus making Iran and Iraq natural allies.
I think George Bush’s decision to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a good one. He did what his father should have done.
Although there were no WMD’s (I was never too sure there were), I did fear that if left alone without sanctions (as would otherwise have happened), he would, with his oil money, have acquired them in the not too distant future. How far along the nuclear road would Saddam have been now if he had not been removed? Is this what we would have wanted?
Some say the invasion was illegal, but Saddam had been illegally breaking the peace treaty from the first war continuously. This alone was enough legal justification for going in.
However, having done the good bit, Bush has made a total mess of it since.
I thought at the time, and still do, that Iraq should have been divided up into three independent countries – the Kurdish area in the north, a central area for the Sunnis, and the southern area for the shiites. Why, for example, should the non-Arab Kurds be forced to be part of an Arab state instead of having their own country?
This would have prevented Iraq becoming a potentially strong and dangerous country in the future, and enabled the Americans to leave quickly. It still seems to me that this is the only acceptable way to get out.
If someone had told me in 2003 that the Americans and British were still going to be there 4 years later, with no end in sight, wasting untold billions of dollars and lives, I would have been quite staggered.
Chess44 said: I would have been quite staggered.
Strange because for me it was so obvious.
Why is “He has done enough damage to chess, let him go into Russian politics” one of the options? I’ve nver heard a bad thing about him.
Obvious to you Peter, but not to us because we thought you thought the world’s civilization was worth saving.
But alas, YOU didn’t help in any way.
Just read my copy of the Wall Street Journal
Kasparov is to be commended. I hope he is around for a long long time.
He’s so right about Clinton and his immediate predecessor