ECO-TERROR
Dispatch From Russia: There are various opinions in Russia's political elite and media about the factors behind America's "imperial" war against Iraq. But one of the most startling for an American draws a sharp parallel with the former Soviet Union's behavior abroad. The Brezhnev Doctrine, as it was called from the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, asserted that countries in the Soviet orbit--primarily in Eastern Europe--had only "limited sovereignty," and therefore that Moscow alone had the right to decide the nature of those countries' political regimes. This was, it is pointed out here, an early version of Washington's current doctrine of pre-emptive war and regime change, and thus the talk in Moscow about "Bush's Brezhnev Doctrine."