“On the surface, the Russian motives seemed most noble: they intended to introduce law and order, found schools and put an end to ancestral blood feuds and to robbery. It’s just that they wanted to do good by force and make the wild mountain tribes happy by first forcing them into submission.” Too bad GW Bush didn’t read Wojciech Jagielski’s Wieże z kamienia (Towers of Stone), from which the above quotation comes, before he invaded Iraq. The reference is to Russia’s attempts to subdue Chechnia in the nineteenth century.