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  • Great game in Eurasia

    Great game in Eurasia

    In the Trenches of the New Cold War: The US, Russia and the great game in Eurasia

    By M K Bhadrakumar

    Curiously, it had to be on the fateful day when Russia had begun brooding over former president Boris Yeltsin’s final, ambivalent legacy that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived on his first official visit to Moscow.

    Hardly had Yeltsin, archetypal symbol of post-Soviet Russia’s “Westernism”, departed than Gates, one of spymaster John le Carre’s “Smiley’s people”, arrived on a mission to let the Kremlin know that no matter Russian sensitivities, Washington was going ahead with its deployment of missile-defense systems along Russia’s borders. Gates reminded the Russians how little had changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

    Gates and Putin in Moscow

    Yet how different Russia is in comparison with the Soviet Union that Gates spied on. Yeltsin was being buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, the final resting place of Russia’s heroes, beside the grave of Raisa Gorbacheva, the wife of Yeltsin’s bitterest political adversary Mikhail Gorbachev – something inconceivable in the annals of Soviet history.

    Gates’ mission was clear-cut. The Russians must realize that in the past two decades since Gorbachev wound up the Warsaw Pact and Yeltsin unilaterally disbanded the Soviet Union, Russia never was, never could have been, and just wouldn’t be accommodated in the common Western home – certainly not until the home was thoroughly refurbished with American decor, for habitation by post-modern Europeans.

    The missile-defense controversy has gone beyond a mere Russian-US spat. It is assuming three distinct templates. First, profound issues of arms control have arisen, and along with that the role of nuclear weapons in security policies gets pronounced. Most certainly, the controversy relates to the United States’ trans-Atlantic leadership in the post-Cold War era. And, finally, quintessentially, it is all about the United States’ global dominance, of which the unfolding Great Game in the Eurasian theaters forms the salience.

    The ABC of missile defense

    The missile-defense controversy assumed a habitation and a name on April 18, when the US State Department released in Washington a “Fact Sheet” detailing the technical parameters of the deployments that the US is contemplating in Poland and the Czech Republic. It said that the US is planning to field 10 long-range ground-based missile interceptors in Poland and a mid-course radar in the Czech Republic to counter the growing threat of missile attacks from the Middle East.

    US Missile Interceptor

    The Fact Sheet revealed that the approximate size of each interceptor missile site (in Poland) and radar site (in the Czech Republic) will be 275 hectares and 30 hectares respectively, and that US military and civilian personnel numbering 200 and 150 would be deployed in each of the interceptor sites and radar sites.

    It said the interceptor missiles will be stored in underground silos in Poland and each base will have facilities for electronic equipment for secure communication, missile assembly, storage, maintenance and security. “They [missiles] carry no warheads of any type, relying instead on their kinetic energy alone to collide with and destroy incoming warheads. Silos constructed for deployment of defensive interceptors are substantially smaller than those used for offensive purposes. Any conversion would require extensive modifications, thus precluding the possibility of converting the interceptor silos for use by offensive missiles,” it said.

    The Fact Sheet explained that intercepts occur at very high altitudes (above the atmosphere) with the vast majority of the threat warhead and the interceptor reduced to small pieces that burn on re-entry. “A few small pieces may survive, but pose little threat to people and property. The odds of damage or injury from an intercept are very small. European interceptors would not be used for flight tests, and would only launch during an actual attack on the United States or Europe,” it said.

    The US statement insisted that the missile-defense system has been proved effective through repeated testing and that 15 of the last 16 flight tests were successful.

    The Fact Sheet attempted to substantiate the main US arguments in the missile defense controversy, which are: (a) the European missile shield is meant to counter possible attacks from Iran or North Korea; (b) the US is puzzled by Russia’s anxiety, since the rockets to be deployed in Central Europe are no match for Russia’s arsenal; (c) Russia itself should be worried about the missile threat from “rogue states”; (d) the US is prepared to cooperate with Russia on missile defense; (e) the US is open to the idea of merging the missile shield with the Russian system; (f) Washington would like Moscow to take part in research and development, though it is unlikely the Russians will consider such cooperation; and (g) the US has endeavored to be “transparent” and is prepared to hold consultations with Russia to explain its case for the deployments in Central Europe.

    Prima facie, the US stance sounds eminently reasonable and conciliatory. But the Russians point out that ever since December 13, 2001, when President George W Bush announced that the US was unilaterally pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, Washington has followed a consistent pattern of deploying along Russian borders radars capable of spotting missile launches and sending targeting data to interceptors. (The first such radar, code-named Have Stare, was stationed in Norway.)

    Russia says these deployments by far predated Bush’s “axis of evil” thesis or the threat perceptions of “rogue states” such as Iran. Russian experts explain that neither Iran nor North Korea could possibly have the scientific or technical capability within the next 20-30 years to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the US. Thus Moscow concludes that the real purpose of the US deployment is to cover the European part of Russia as far as the Urals.

    Russia reacts

    First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov told The Financial Times in an interview last week, “Since there aren’t, and won’t be, any ICBMs [with North Korea and Iran], then against whom, against whom, is this system directed? Only against us.”

    And on Thursday, Russia announced that it is considering withdrawing from the Soviet-era Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, under which NATO and the Warsaw Pact agreed to reduce their conventional armed forces at the end of the Cold War. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had failed to implement the treaty, President Vladimir Putin said, and unless it did so, Russia would dump it unilaterally. Putin described the US defense plan as a “direct threat”.

    Moscow doubts the sincerity of US pledges to be cooperative with Russia. Ivanov said, “I see no reasons for that,” referring to the logic of Russian-US cooperation in missile defense. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov derisively said at a press conference on Tuesday in Luxembourg, “We are against any proposal that turns Europe into a playground for someone. We do not want to play these games.”

    Clearly, the Russians are also not taken in by the US plea that the proposed deployments in Central Europe are modest. As prominent Russian commentator Viktor Litovkin (editor of the Russian publication Independent Military Review) put it, “It would be naive to think that Washington will limit its appetites to Poland and the Czech Republic, or to the modest potential that it is now talking about.”

    He continued, “Nobody can guarantee that there will not 20, then 100, or even more of them [interceptor missiles] or that they will not be replaced with their upgraded versions that are being developed in the US.” Besides, Russian experts have assessed that the US may expand this system in future to include sea-based elements and space-based monitoring equipment.

    In the words of the chief of the Russian Air Force Staff, General Boris Cheltsov, the proposed US deployments have “the potential to destroy Russian strategic nuclear forces at the most vulnerable stage: the initial, ascending leg of the trajectory”.

    The “asymmetrical” countermeasures being debated by Russian experts in recent weeks include shortening the boost phase of Russian missiles by converting liquid-fueled missiles to solid-propellant ones; enhancing the maneuvering capacity of the missiles both in the vertical and horizontal planes; using depressed trajectories that practically never rise above the dense layers of the atmosphere; and so on.

    Gates, who met with Putin on April 24, invited Moscow to cooperate on a host of issues related to the missile-defense system. In his public comments, Gates gave a positive spin to his discussions at the Kremlin. He said he was ending his visit on a “very positive tone … We made some real headway in clearing up some misunderstanding about the technical characteristics of the system that are of concern to the Russians.”

    But Russia’s top brass reacted swiftly to Gates’ upbeat tone, maintaining that the proposed US deployments in Central Europe are aimed at Russia and that there is hardly any scope for cooperation. The chief of the Russian General Staff, General Yury Baluyevsky, said: “The real goal [of the US deployment] is to protect [the US] from Russian and Chinese nuclear-missile potential and to create exclusive conditions for the invulnerability of the United States.”

    Gen. Yury Baluyevsky

    He warned that Moscow will monitor the US deployments closely, and “if we see that these installations pose a threat to Russia’s national security, they will be targeted by our forces. What measures we are going to use – strategic, nuclear or other – is a technical issue.”

    All the same, the Russian reaction has been restrained. The Kremlin seems to have a pragmatic diplomatic strategy in mind. As Putin has said, the Russian reaction may be “asymmetrical” but highly effective. Evidently, Putin is averse to getting on to a collision course with Washington. His priorities at the moment are that he remain focused on the development of Russia’s economy and on the acute social problems affecting Russia’s progress. In the final year of his presidency, Putin is conscious of his political legacy.

    Russian politics are increasingly revolving around the change of leadership at the Kremlin next March. Meanwhile, the US presidential campaign has begun. As Moscow would see it, traditionally, a “hardline” policy toward Russia wins more support for the US Republican Party.

    Objectively speaking, Russian-US relations have no reason to deteriorate the way they did during the Cold War. The two countries are not hostile toward each other. On the contrary, they need to cooperate on a variety of issues of common concern, such as terrorism and nuclear proliferation, including the Iran and North Korea nuclear issues. Their economic ties are also increasing.

    All the same, significant rifts exist in Russian-US relations and the missile-defense controversy has “plunged relations with Russia to their lowest since the end of the Cold War”, to quote The Guardian. Behind the facade of the conciliatory noises during Gates’ visit to Moscow, unnamed US officials accompanying the defense secretary are quoted as saying, “We’re going to continue to make this effort with Russia, but we’re also very clear, whether Russia cooperates with us or not is really up to Russia.” The feeling in Moscow is that the US has reneged on an agreement after the collapse of the Soviet Union to abandon Cold War politics.

    US rallies European support

    Moscow feels disheartened to note that US diplomacy has largely succeeded in getting NATO on board. After a special meeting in Brussels on April 19 at NATO headquarters with high-level representatives from Washington, which was followed by a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, it was announced that NATO has a united missile-defense approach; that the territory of all member countries must be protected from missile threats; that the threat of missile attacks is real; and that the US deployments in Central Europe “would not affect the strategic balance with Russia”.

    Of course, beneath the veneer of unity, it appears there are differences. German Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday that at least six NATO allies, including Germany, had raised doubts about the project at the NATO meeting on April 19.

    But the discussion among NATO allies is no longer between the “new” and the “old” Europeans, as Russian commentators would have us believe. The German daily Handelsblatt pointed out that the issue now is whether the planned US system can protect all of Europe or not. It added, “So far it can’t … But if the US can offer a working missile shield for a viable price that would also include southern Europe, the resistance in most European countries will fall away.”

    Indeed, there is a considerable body of skeptics who feel, like Philip Coyle, a weapons testing and evaluation specialist who served in the administration of US president Bill Clinton, the US missile-defense system is “like trying to hit a hole in one in golf … [when] the hole is going 15,000 miles an hour [24,000 km/h] … as if the hole and the green were both going 15,000 mph, the green covered with black circles, and you do not know what to aim for”. Yet, Coyle admits, “If Russia were installing missile-defense systems in Canada or Cuba, we [Washington] would react much the same way. We are surrounding them and getting closer to their territorial boundaries.”

    On the other hand, Washington is counting on the shift to the right in the locus of European politics. It is much to Moscow’s disadvantage that Nicolas Sarkozy is on course to succeed Jacques Chirac as French president. That leaves Romano Prodi in Rome as the lone ranger from Moscow’s side. Moscow would have assessed that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is already playing for time. She refuses to be pinned down on the missile-defense controversy. In essence, Merkel believes in the benefits of closer trans-Atlantic cooperation.

    Der Spiegel reported last week in an exclusive report that Merkel, Bush and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso have agreed to set up a wide-ranging economic partnership between the European Union and the United States that “would have the aim of dismantling the non-tariff barriers to trade”. The German daily revealed that a confidential draft has already been drawn up for a treaty establishing a “new trans-Atlantic economic partnership” that will be signed at the EU-US summit in Washington next week.

    The rationale behind the initiative, which originated from Washington, is that Western governments must act quickly to combat the rise of China (“dark superpower”) and Asia. To quote Der Spiegel, “The role NATO played in an age of military threat could be played by a trans-Atlantic free-trade zone in today’s age of economic confrontation. The two economic zones – EU and the US (perhaps with the addition of Canada) – could stem the dwindling of Western market power by joining forces. Together the Europeans and the Americans are still a force to be reckoned with. Representing about 13% of the world’s population and 60% of today’s global economic power, they stand ready to act as producers and consumers not only of goods, but also of values.” Interestingly, Merkel used her keynote speech at the World Economic Forum in January to push for closer trans-Atlantic economic links.

    Clearly, Washington has reason to be confident that the residual opposition in Europe to US missile-defense deployments, too, may prove to be nebulous. Meanwhile, Russia’s relations with the EU as such have entered a difficult phase. In a recent speech, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, a highly respected voice of moderation in Europe, bemoaned that mistrust and a lack of respect in relations between the EU and Russia are at their worst since the Cold War. “Unless we comprehend our different perceptions of the landscape left behind by the last century, we risk getting the EU-Russia relationship badly wrong,” he said.

    The EU’s blueprint of its new Central Asia strategy, to be adopted at the EU summit in June, will likely be viewed in Moscow as an unwelcome encroachment, especially given its thrust on developing energy cooperation with the region by bypassing Russian transportation routes.

    Russian oil and gas routes

    In immediate terms, a virtual EU-Russia standoff is building up over Kazakhstan’s participation in a US$6 billion gas-pipeline project that is an extension of the South Caucasus pipeline, linking Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, and which is expected to run from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. The 3,400-kilometer pipeline across the Caspian bypassing Russia, which is to be built from early next year so as to go on stream in 2011, will have a capacity of 30 billion cubic meters and promises to be a rival to Russian Gazprom’s Blue Stream-2 (scheduled to be commissioned in 2012).

    Moscow is well aware that Washington is the driving spirit behind the EU’s energy policy toward Central Asia. Washington calculates that Moscow will be inexorably drawn into a standoff with the EU over the latter’s increasingly proactive policies in Eurasia.

    Without doubt, there are contradictory tendencies in trans-Atlantic relations. Of course, there is a degree of queasiness in Europe about US power and influence on the continent in the post-Cold War era. Much of Europe doesn’t think that the US missile-defense system works, let alone that an apocalyptic Iranian threat exists. Even in Poland and the Czech Republic there is widespread public opposition to the US deployments. The major European capitals resent that Washington is negotiating bilaterally with Warsaw and Prague, as if a coherent European security and defense policy independent of NATO is never achievable for Europe.

    The European sensibility watches with dismay that not only has the EU dream of a big, peaceful post-modern federation receded but the specter of new Cold War-like divisions has begun haunting Europe. Many in Europe would agree with Gorbachev when he said last week that the missile-defense controversy “is all about influence and domination”.

    To be sure, trans-Atlantic relations are undergoing a major transformation. Despite all the talk of kindred values and similar social systems, the US is no longer supportive of the European project of integration. True, the Americans were at one time the promoters of the European project. But now they have developed distaste for the idea of European integration. And the Europeans remain uneasy about US “unilateralism”.

    On the other hand, Europe also faces an identity crisis. The Berlin Declaration, which was adopted last month on the 50th anniversary of the European Economic Community, completely overlooked the objective of the pan-European project. Translated into EU-Russia relations, all this means is that neither side seems to know what it wants from the other side. As things stand, it is highly unlikely that the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement of 1999 between the EU and Russia, which expires at the end of this year, will be extended or replaced by a new treaty.

    Arms race in the making?

    After Gates’ mission to Moscow, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Sergei Kislyak warned that the controversy has the potential to create obstacles to the development of bilateral relations for a long time. “It will be a strategic irritant for years to come,” he said. Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov went a step further: “The Russian position on this issue remains unchanged. The strategic missile defense system is a serious destabilizing factor that could have significant impact on regional and global security” (emphasis added).

    Serdyukov’s reference to “global security” gives an altogether different dimension to the missile-defense controversy. Russian experts feel that the deployment of the missile-defense system is the first step in a carefully thought-out US strategy toward overcoming the mutual strategic deterrence that formed the basis of Russian-US strategic stability in the Cold War era.

    They estimate that Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty formed part of a series of unilateral actions in simultaneously building up the United States’ offensive forces (not only nuclear but also non-nuclear precision attack systems) and active defense assets, including missile-defense systems. In short, they apprehend that the US is aiming at replacing the “balance of terror” with total military superiority.

    Besides, Russian experts estimate that the Bush administration has created a selective arms-control situation. Writing in the Russian military journal Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, the influential director of the USA and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, academician Sergei Rogov, pointed out last month in a lengthy article that the Bush administration has been selectively abrogating arms-control treaties that it considers as interfering with the United States’ “military organizational development”.

    Sergei Rogov

    “But if agreements limit Moscow to a greater extent than Washington, then they continue to be in force, i.e., strategic stability based on ‘mutual nuclear deterrence’ is being impaired gradually, step by step,” Rogov wrote. That is to say, the Bush administration has been “building up US military superiority and weakening Russia’s nuclear deterrence potential”.

    However, Rogov pointed out, “The deployment of space-based weapons cannot begin earlier than the second half of the next decade. On the whole, the echeloned, multi-tiered strategic missile defense system, including relatively effective ground-based, sea-based, air-based and space-based intercept assets, will take on real outlines in the 2020s, but the process of its formation most likely will drag on right up until the middle of this century. We repeat that all this will require a solution to a large number of very difficult technical problems as well as a manifold increase in funding.”

    Rogov noted that Moscow already has its own missile-defense system with 100 interceptor missiles, and its S-300 and S-400 air-defense assets also have specific capabilities for intercepting missiles. In other words, Moscow can draw comfort that the situation of “mutual assured destruction” will prevail for at least the next 10-15 years in Russian-US relations. Rogov argues that in the interim, instead of knee-jerk reactions or resorting to “a ruinous arms race”, Russia must coolly ensure through mutually reinforcing politico-diplomatic and military-technical steps that the overall strategic balance with the US based on “mutual nuclear deterrence” is preserved.

    From this perspective, Rogov proposed several measures in the nature of Russia accelerating its program for outfitting its Strategic Nuclear Forces with weapons systems capable of penetrating the US missile-defense system. He suggested that the road-mobile Topol-M ICBM be fitted with MIRVs (maneuverable re-entry vehicles). Again, Russia must concentrate on precision air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) capable of destroying missile-defense facilities. Russia’s present fleet of Tu-95MS and Tu-160 strategic bombers and Tu-22M3 medium bombers are potentially capable of carrying about 1,500 ALCMs. Rogov argued that measures such as these will be cost-effective insofar as mass production of ICBMs and ALCMs will cost less than US$1 billion per year – a tiny fraction of the US expenditure in developing the missile-defense system.

    Russia’s TU-95MS strategic bomber

    Rogov also called for an “auditing” of the arms-control agreements that Russia inherited from the Soviet era so that a cool assessment is made as to how Russia’s interests will be served by the preservation of these agreements in their present form. He wrote, “Who needs such selective arms control? We will support ‘mutual nuclear deterrence’, playing a game without rules like the Americans, as at the height of the Cold War before 1972.”

    Talking to the Russian media on Thursday after Gates’ talks in Moscow, Rogov said Russia and the US “are still hostages of mutual nuclear intimidation … We are on the brink of a new ‘cold war’ if one looks closely at our present-day relations.” He warned that unless the negative tendencies in Russian-US relations are arrested soon, “I do not rule out that at the 2008 presidential elections in the US, both Republicans and Democrats may bring forward a thesis on the need for a Russia-containment policy.”

    The new cold war

    Moscow has repeatedly warned in the recent period that enough is enough and that it is not prepared to be pushed around anymore. There is deep resentment over NATO’s continued expansion in contravention of promises held out to Moscow that this would not happen. But ignoring Russian sensitivities on this score, Bush signed a new law on April 10 (the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007) urging admission of Albania, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia and Ukraine into the alliance and authorizing new funding for military training and equipment for them.

    Washington is also aggressively pursuing a policy of rollback of Russian influence in the former Soviet republics. On the same day that the new law on NATO expansion was signed, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the media that Washington has “tried to make very clear to Russia … that the days when these [Commonwealth of Independent States] states were part of the Soviet Union are gone, they’re not coming back.” Already by the end of 2007, Georgia is poised to start its NATO-membership program. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has said, “We expect to receive the status of an official NATO candidate in the next few months.”

    Again, Washington’s line on the status of the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo has hardened. Senior US officials have threatened that regardless of Russian opposition, and whether the United Nations Security Council agrees or not, Washington proposes to go ahead and recognize Kosovo’s independence. There is also a distinctly familiar pattern in the sustained political turmoil in Kyrgyzstan bankrolled from Washington. The instability in Kyrgyzstan has added significance for Russia insofar as Bishkek is expected to host the next summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

    Moscow maintains an air of passivity but is deeply concerned. In a thinly veiled reference to the US backing for the so-called “color revolutions”, the secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, General Nikolai Bordyuzha, said in a speech in Almaty on April 19, “Today, it is not only Afghanistan that the entire post-Soviet space is concerned about. There is a problem of the export of revolutions – the problem of attempts to intentionally bring about their elements. And we can see it. Today, there are recognizable people, exporters of revolution, the so-called contemporary revolutionaries – new Che Guevaras – in the post-Soviet space.”

    Russia and Central Asia

    The change of leadership in Turkmenistan has opened a window of opportunity for the US to make overtures to Ashgabat. Significantly, the new Turkmen leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, chose Saudi Arabia for his first visit abroad. The EU has already offered the new Turkmen leadership 1.7 million euros ($2.3 million) for undertaking a feasibility study on a trans-Caspian gas-pipeline project that would obviate the need for Turkmen gas to be exported via Russia.

    The US is using the EU to curry favor with Uzbekistan and somehow let bygones be bygones. The EU is showing signs of getting down from its high horse and unilaterally dismantling tje sanctions regime that it imposed on Uzbekistan after the Andizhan incidents in May 2005. Again, the US is relentlessly working at loosening Russia’s grip in the South Caucasus – Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

    But the ferocity with which the US has reacted to the revival of Russian influence in Ukraine has no precedent. The Ukraine developments show that Washington is determined at any cost to surround Russia with a ring of countries that are hostile to it. Washington has assessed that, if only by subverting the constitutional processes and by discrediting the fledgling political institutions (which are actually a legacy of the “Orange Revolution”) the US can bring about “regime change” in Kiev, so be it.

    The present turmoil began soon after Yulia Timoshenko, the darling of the “Orange Revolution”, visited Washington two months ago and was received by senior US officials, including Rice. The stakes are indeed high in Ukraine. Unless Kiev is brought back under a subservient pro-American setup, how can Ukraine possibly become a NATO member and how can US missile-defense systems be deployed on Ukrainian soil, given widespread opposition to the idea among the people of that country?

    Professor Stephen Cohen, the venerable doyen of Sovietologists, recently surveyed the topsoil of the newly dug trenches in Russian-US rivalry: “Relations between Russia and the United Sates are very bad at present. I think we’re already seeing a cold war. At least, that is America’s policy on Russia. Your country [Russia] is being fairly passive. Understandably, the Kremlin doesn’t want to escalate tension again. But it isn’t clear that the Kremlin is capable of preventing that. Much will depend on how NATO’s relations with Ukraine and Georgia develop. This is the new front of the new Cold War.”

    It is appropriate that the working group set up on Thursday as a joint initiative by Putin and Bush, against the backdrop of these growing tensions, focus on relations between the two great powers, will be headed as co-chairmen by two formidable veterans of the Cold War era – Henry Kissinger and Yevgeny Primakov.

    Yet the People’s Daily might well have had a point when it commented last week with an acerbic tone of detachment and disdain, “The core of the US-Russian oral spat is a conflict of interests. Naturally, both countries want maximum benefits. That explains why the US supports anti-government forces within Russia, promotes ‘democracy’ – a one-sided wish – in foreign lands, continues to support eastern expansion of NATO, and asks for missile-defense deployment in Eastern Europe, while Russia exercises a measured US policy. It can be predicted that, facing US attacks, Russian-US ties featuring both contention and cooperation will not change in the short term.”

    M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

    This is a slightly edited version of an article that appeared in Asia Times on April 28, 2007. Posted at Japan Focus on April 29, 2007.

    Source: www.apanfocus.org

  • Is Russia able to Handle the Crisis?

    Is Russia able to Handle the Crisis?

    Introduced by Vladimir Frolov
    Russia Profile

    Contributors: Vladimir Belaeff, Stephen Blank, Ethan S. Burger, Vlad Ivanenko, Eugene Kolesnikov

    A debate on whether the Russian political system needs an overhaul has turned into a shouting match between senior Kremlin officials. Last week, First Deputy Head of the presidential administration Vladislav Surkov criticized Dmitry Medvedev’s senior advisors Arkadiy Dvorkovich and Igor Yurgens, who had the audacity to criticize the government’s approach to handling the crisis, and even went as far as to suggest that Russia’s political system has become too rigid to enable Russia to withstand the crisis. What does this debate reveal? Does it show that there is room for a healthy debate at the highest levels of power in Russia? What could be a realistic adjustment of Russia’s political system now that would not bring the house down?

    Surkov took issue with Yurgens’ thesis that the political bargain of Vladimir Putin’s era, when Russian society renounced some of its rights and freedoms in exchange for the petro-dollars trickling down, is no longer viable, and that now, when prosperity is over, the society would like to have some of its abdicated rights back.

    A week before that, Presidential Aide Arkadiy Dvorkovich said that the authorities were ill-prepared to handle the crisis due to the institutional deficiencies in the system.

    Surkov ridiculed Yurgens and Dvorkovich by arguing that their position lacks credibility and substance. “A host of conclusions follows from this suggestion,” he said. “We should get together somewhere for some kind of forum — what kind is unclear; and discuss something — no one says what; we should remake everything from scratch and create new institutions. The ‘old’ political system was either not created for these tasks and can no longer fulfill its functions, or it was the fruit of the previous plenty, and everything now will be different, and it is apparently necessary to change this system urgently.”

    Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and the Solidarity coalition have called for the government’s resignation, early elections, elections of governors, and a new Constitution, all by the end of 2009. This is obviously not serious.

    Surkov scoffed at the notion that prosperity limits freedom. “Freedom has a material dimension,” he argued, “and the prosperity of citizens increased in recent years not in order to take away people’s freedom, but in order to make people free.” He defended Russia’s political system as “working” in these challenging times. Its rigidity, he asserts, is its strength, not its weakness, because it will hold the country together during the crisis and won’t allow it to come apart at the seams, as it once nearly did in 1990s.

    Surkov is right in saying that calls for a complete overhaul of Russia’s political system are downright irresponsible. Now is probably not the time to engage in soul searching. Action is needed more than words. “It is always much more fun to change everything, to reject everything, and to try something new,” Surkov said. “This, in my view, is our biggest vice: we are unwilling to finish anything off, we are ready to abandon everything at the half-way stage — sweepingly and without thinking about the consequences. At the same time, no one has calculated how the new political system will look, or what the cost of introducing it, yet another new system, will be.”

    But Surkov is wrong in claiming that the system is working well enough. It is not. The Duma and the Federation Council, as well as all major political parties, have been emaciated by their utter irrelevance in developing the response to the crisis. Surkov’s claim that no parliament in the world can produce effective solutions is simply ill-informed. A political system where the nation’s parliament is an irrelevant institution needs more than a facelift.

    What does this debate reveal, other than that there are conflicting groups in the Kremlin vying for the right to set the agenda of Medvedev’s presidency? Does it show that there is room for a healthy debate at the highest levels of power in Russia? If so, could it be proof that the system may indeed be working? How viable and politically savvy are the opposition calls for razing the Putin/Medvedev system to the ground, before something good actually happens in Russia? What could be a realistic adjustment of Russia’s political system now that would not bring the house down? Are there similar calls for reforming the political system to better withstand the crisis in Western democracies? Surely people in Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Greece went to the streets to demand a better response from the government? Do political systems in these troubled nations deserve a complete overhaul? And could the election of Barack Obama count as such in the United States?

    Vlad Ivanenko, Ph.D., Economist, Ottawa:

    Several years ago I informally rated people in then-president Putin’s entourage according their ability to view things strategically. According to my estimates, Vladislav Surkov was at the top, while Arkady Dvorkovich occupied the middle position and Igor Yurgens was not considered. Judging by the account given above, I do not see the need to change my previous estimates: again, Surkov outclasses his opponents. In order to see the logic of this argument, it is necessary to regard the current Russian situation in the context of the global economic crisis and the Russian government’s binding constraints.

    In the situation of general uncertainty, two national governments seem to outperform their peers: the Chinese and the Russian. True, their relative success is largely based on huge foreign currency reserves that they have accumulated, but also on the quality of their public decision-making. I am more knowledgeable of Russian affairs, to which I return now.

    Data demonstrates that Russia performs relatively well in the areas where its government has a role to play. It has averted the collapse of its banking system and withstood speculative attacks on the ruble, contrary to popular expectations. The Central Bank registers modest growth in its foreign reserves ($387 billion in mid-March), while the Ministry of Finance reports that the federal budget continues, surprisingly in recessionary times, to be in surplus. I have had a look at the Russian plan to reform the “obsolescent” global financial system, which the country will present at the G20 meeting, and I have found the proposals sensible. Since the facts that I know indicate that the government has performed satisfactorily, I cannot agree with Surkov’s opponents that the Russian system does not work.

    The tradeoff between social well-being and democracy that Yurgens has postulated in his claim that “economic well-being is shrinking … (hence) civil rights should expand” is not substantiated. Globally, the crisis shows an acute deficit of leaders who can not only react to the problems, but also take a proactive stance, nipping appearing problems in the bud. The economic system that economists have learned in their schools is collapsing in front of our eyes. The time has come to review the recipes prescribed in current economic cookbooks, but they are exactly what the majority of the democratically-elected governments try to follow: to enlarge government expenditure, to provide fiscal stimuli, and to ease financial credit constraint. To make a definite break with established practices requires a charismatic leader who can take the sole responsibility for the consequences. Let us be honest here: democracy with its ingrained system of checks and balances is not suitable for a battlefield.

    I share Dvorkovich’s pessimism regarding “the present elite, which is above all bureaucratic,” but I do not see how he is going to replace it with “a new elite which will be more open to society,” save by the way of revolution. My opinion appears to be congruent with the view that Russian society at large exposes in opinion surveys: respondents continue to show a high degree of confidence in the ultimate representatives of the elite—that is, in national leaders. Surkov’s response shows that he is also aware of the problem, but leans toward an evolutionary replacement of the elite.

    Curiously, this debate within the Kremlin walls reveals a weakness of its economic camp. Apart from Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who is largely responsible for macroeconomic stability, there is no economist of a high caliber who would take the lead in developing an economic strategy for Russia. There are sensible ideas floating around, but I have yet to see what the government strategy is regarding the questions of Russian global specialization and the degree of its economic integration with its neighbors. Surkov needs to meet a formidable opponent on the economic flank before he starts losing points in the Kremlin’s games.

    Ethan S. Burger, Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC :

    In recent weeks, the Russian policy-making process seems to have become slightly more transparent. Indeed, not merely political figures but their advisors are beginning to publicly engage in serious debate. Query to what audience they are addressing themselves. In is unlikely that the First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Vladislav Surkov (a former intelligence officer and then Deputy Chief of Staff to then-President Vladimir Putin) as well as Medvedev’s advisors Arkadiy Dvorkovich and Igor Yurgens are making spontaneous remarks to the Russian media. Are we embarking on a new era?

    Russian Constitution chapters four and six, respectively, set out the powers of the Russian president and the chairman of the Russian government (i.e. the prime minister). The Russian Constitution provides that the Russian president directs foreign and domestic policies; acts as the guarantor of the Constitution; appoints and fires the prime minister, as well as other federal ministers subject to parliamentary approval. Whereas, the Russian prime minister generally chairs the Russian cabinet; implements domestic and foreign policy as well as presidential edicts, laws and international agreements; coordinates economic and fiscal policy, manages federal property; sets prices for gas, electricity and domestic transportation; and controls domestic policies. Both the late President Boris Yeltsin and then-President Vladimir Putin had multiple prime ministers.

    A cursory reading of the Russian Constitution envisions that the prime minister is subordinate to the president. In practice, the line between determining policy and implementing it can be difficult to discern – the prime minister has a large amount of discretion with respect to the manner in which policy is carried out. Furthermore, when the prime minister is also head of the majority party in the State Duma, further complexity is added. The Russian Constitution was drafted in a fashion where the president was the most important political actor. Typically, in parliamentary governmental systems, the president (or monarch) has largely ceremonial functions, and the prime minister, as the leader of the largest party in the legislature, plays the most prominent role.

    Undoubtedly, at present the Russian Constitution does not seem to describe the Russian political reality. This situation appears to become increasingly problematic. The divide between policy and politics is not always clear, and may change over time. In fact, policy differences may give rise to political differences, as well as the reverse. The magnitude of the global economic crisis is so complex and enormous that it would be unrealistic to assume that two informed individuals would be in complete agreement on the proper approach to take to address the ramifications of the present situation, both in the short and long terms.

    The Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has noted that some Russian business persons had become extraordinarily wealthy in a short time. Almost as a moral imperative, he has called on those individuals who amassed great wealth not to downsize their workforces – in an ironic way, he seems to be implying that in the absence of a government-provided safety net, those who became wealthy (often as a result of their acquisition of the country’s natural resources) cannot act as if they have no social responsibility for the well-being of their employees and even the country as a whole. At present, one can only speculate as to whether this thinking is his own, or if it is shared by his mentor prime minister Putin.

    During the Putin presidency, political power became increasingly centralized and authoritarian.  In the aftermath of the disorder of the Yeltsin years, the majority of the Russian populace regarded this situation as tolerable, because the economic conditions seemed to be improving — largely a by-product of higher commodity prices. That era is certainly over with regard to economics – it remains to be seen whether Russian society has the capability to effectuate change in the country’s political system.

    The centralized Russian political system seems to make a smooth transition to another form of government difficult. The greatest uncertainties for Russia are how severe the current economic crisis is, and will something resembling a consensus on the steps that need to be taken develop.  If there is some form of consensus, will it be global, regional, or country specific. Can it be achieved peaceably and with a minimum of human suffering, or will economic stratification lead to political instability and insecurity? In any case, will the existing political framework both domestically and international prove sufficiently adept at managing the inevitable changes?  While a “mixed-economic” system may well emerge in many countries – will new political systems also be necessary? Unfortunately, in many countries, merely to raise these questions may involve great hardship for some.

    Eugene Kolesnikov, Private Consultant, the Netherlands:

    t is implied in the introduction to the panel, and has been stated recently by a number of public figures in Russia, that an effective response to the crisis requires more democracy. The argument goes as follows: a more democratic setup at all levels of society can help better capture numerous distress signals arising as the crisis unfolds, and it can also ensure flexibility and promptness in responding to such signals.

    Nothing can be farther from the truth than this unfortunate belief. Russia, as indeed all other countries, is fighting an economic and a related societal emergency that may escalate into an existential threat. Anyone who has ever worked in corporations or organizations that prepare for emergencies or had to respond to them knows full well that the first order of business in crisis management is centralization of control. Tighter control and centralized management of a crisis is essential for quick mobilization of resources, making hard decisions and maintaining discipline. The more organized and aligned the emergency response is, the better the chance that it will succeed.

    Fortunately, Russia’s current political system gives it major advantage and opportunity in crisis management. There is substantial centralization and discipline for the state to be able to mobilize resources, make unpopular decisions and respond to problems strategically rather than tactically in a populist fashion. The worst case scenario for the country and its people would be a democracy galore with populists, liberals and adventurists capitalizing on the difficulties, fueling popular discontent, and destabilizing the response to the unfolding crisis.

    It is really a big question whether the so-called developed democracies of the West can deal with a real crisis. They are generally slow, inflexible, obsessed with polls and elections and lacking stamina to make and carry out unpopular decisions. Western countries are stabilized by either prosperity or war, with almost no middle ground between these two poles. Not for nothing Zbigniew Brzezinski recently appealed to the rich to share with the poor and warned of possible riots in the United States if the situation is not changed.

    This crisis will test the strength of all systems and societies. I believe that Russia has a good chance to get through the crisis successfully thanks to the transformation of governance that took place during the last nine years. I have serious doubts that the touted western democracies are strong enough to emerge from this crisis unscathed or, indeed, as democratic as they had been before it started.

    Professor Stephen Blank, the U.S. Army War College, Carlyle Barracks, PA:

    It would take more than 600 words to answer all the questions posed here, but we should not make the mistake of thinking that because the debate is confined to high-ranking officials that it is not a serious debate. Unfortunately though, while liberalization could be in the offing, fundamental reform is not. As Anders Aslund once said, Russia has an exceptionally venal ruling class, and that has not changed, if anything it has probably gotten worse given the stakes involved and the ubiquity of corruption.

    This debate to my mind does not show that the “system is working.” If anything, it shows that it is not working as intended, because Russian leaders like Putin have a horror of public controversy. Of course, Medvedev or Putin could be orchestrating this to smoke out the opponents of each other’s policy. But it would be fair to say that it only betrays the ignorance and provincialism of the Russian elite to assert that no parliament in the world can produce effective solutions.

    Likewise, demonstrations against failed governments in Europe suggest that the democratic system, though not the government, is working. In Russia we’ve already seen the response to protests, and the idea that conflict must be kept in house only leads to a hot house which ultimately boils over, as it did in 1917 and 1991. Furthermore, there are so many places to begin when one contemplates what could be done to reform the system entirely that one could start anywhere, e.g., instituting genuine accountability of the government before the parliament and the law, ending political trials and what used to be called “telephone justice.”

    But I will use the opportunity here to suggest that as long as Russia has a political police whose real mission is not the defense of the state but suppression of dissent and domestic political intrigues, and which is not answerable to and accountable to the law and the parliament, it cannot be considered a democracy.

    Likewise a secure right of private property is another touchstone of a legal system (Rechtstaat) and market economy, neither of which exists in Russia. I know that a herd of political scientists and economists believe that Russia has a market economy, but they are wrong.

    Thus, it remains to be seen whether Medvedev will do more than tinker around the edges of the patrimonial or neo-Tsarist regime. And until he does, it will also remain the case that every such debate will be anxiously scrutinized to see if it heralds the beginning of the end of the system, a scrutiny that eloquently testifies to the archaic, neo-feudal nature of the Russian state and its inherent “dysfunctionality” for modern times.

    Vladimir Belaeff, President, Global Society Institute, San Francisco, CA:

    Sometimes perceptions originating inside a system can be clouded by too much proximity: “not seeing the forest for the trees.”

    The global economic crisis is extremely stressful to all countries, including those which are highly advanced,

    Organizationally. In these circumstances, in comparison, the performance of Russia’s political and governing system so far has been quite good. It must be remembered that the crisis is acknowledged as the worst in at least 60 years, possibly as many as 80. Yes, Russia experiences painful phenomena – growing unemployment, significant (although moderate: 14 percent in 2008) consumer price inflation, a drop in tax revenues, a draining of currency reserves.

    But – the Russian social safety net continues to function (unlike some other countries) there have been no spectacular corporate failures or financial scandals (unlike the United States, considered by many a paradigm of effective governance). Strategic economic sectors and major projects continue to work; there is growing import substitution; the devalued ruble is holding steady, and occasionally regaining lost ground relative to the dollar and the euro. Agricultural output grew substantially. In 2008 Russia’s current account balance dropped by 25 percent relative to the prior year – and remained strongly positive at $78 billion.

    In Western media there appear frequent alarmist comments forecasting “imminent” collapse in Russia; these forecasts migrate by a kind of news osmosis into some Russian domestic media as well. However, so far these dire predictions are fortunately false. Certainly, quite a few developed countries show evidence of a much deeper economic dislocation caused by the crisis, when compared with Russia. There is a view that the alarmist Western forecasts may be a kind of negative advertising, intended to create uncertainty about an economy that can obviously attract scarce liquidity in current capital markets. Capital that avoids Russia because of alarmist forecasts will be invested somewhere else.

    Therefore, in my opinion, the question of adequacy of Russia’s political institutions in the present severe crisis must be answered in the affirmative. Evidently, there is no perfect system, and just like in America, the European Union and other complex societies, Russia can and should continuously examine and work to improve its governance. Corruption is an issue – and at this time there are 40,000 corruption prosecutions in process: probably close to the saturation limit of Russia’s justice system.

    Russia’s economic governance in conditions of exceptional stress is generally effective and is shifting the economy in the direction of active survival, with positioning for post-crisis growth. Given recent events, like the AIG executive bonus scandal, one would rather challenge the effectiveness and results of the U.S. government’s response inside the original locus of the crisis. In comparison to other countries, Russia’s governance appears significantly more effective.

    On Sunday March 1 there were elections for local legislatures and city governments in major regions of Russia. These elections are correctly viewed as a kind of “referendum” on Russia’s governance. The results of these elections confirmed broad support for the governing party–United Russia. In some districts United Russia posted increases relative to prior polls. This result confirms that the electorate of Russia continues to approve the current policies of the government.

    Russia’s political system is responding well and better than in other countries to the extreme challenges of the global economic crisis. Although some impatience may be understandable, in my opinion it is misdirected. In other countries (the United States, UK, Portugal, Iceland, Greece) the effectiveness of the political system is questioned less, and yet recent governance experience in some of these countries is obviously disappointing.

    Source:  www.russiaprofile.org, March 20, 2009

  • US-Russian partnership will end shield row

    US-Russian partnership will end shield row

    Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:11:00 GMT

    Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski believes if the US and Russia work together they would eliminate the need to install a defense shield in central Europe against the "Iranian threat."

    A former US national security adviser says the US-Russian “cooperation” on Iran would lead to the shelving of a defense shield plan in Europe.

    In an interview with a Polish daily, President Jimmy Carter’s advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said pushing the “reset button” in Russia-US relations is likely to change the situation created by Iran’s nuclear activities.

    He added that if the US and Russia join forces to mount pressure on Iran it would reduce or even eliminate the need for Washington to deploy a missile shield in Central Europe.

    Russian daily Kommersant cited White House sources as saying earlier last week that President Barack Obama had made a proposal to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev asking him to change position on Iran in exchange for a halt to the US missile shield plan.

    Plans for the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic have contributed to the deterioration of White House-Kremlin relations over the past few years.

    The missile shield plan has rankled Moscow, as it sees the system as a threat to its national security. President Obama has addressed the Russian concern by saying that he wants to press the “reset button” and build better relations with Moscow.

    The White House under former President George W. Bush said the missile defense shield is necessary to counter a threat posed by “rogue states”, such as Iran.

    Russia, however, says it will not be taken in by the “missile threat” excuse.

    “No sensible person believes in fairy tales about the Iranian missile threat, and that thousands of kilometers from Tehran on the coast of the Baltic Sea, it is necessary to station a missile interceptor system,” Russia’s NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin said in November 2008.

    The US, Israel and their European allies — Britain, France and Germany — claim that Iran is developing a military nuclear program.

    Tehran, however, denies the charge that it is seeking to build a bomb and argues that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – to which it is a signatory – allows for a domestic, civilian nuclear industry.

    CS/HGH

    Source: www.presstv.ir, 16 Mar 2009

  • Poor Richard’s Report

    Poor Richard’s Report

     

    Attribution from strafor.com

    Turkey and Russia on the Rise

    March 17, 2009

    By Reva Bhalla, Lauren Goodrich and Peter Zeihan

    Russian President Dmitri Medvedev reportedly will travel to Turkey in the near future to follow up a recent four-day visit by his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, to Moscow. The Turks and the Russians certainly have much to discuss.

    Related Special Topic Pages
    The Russian Resurgence
    Turkey’s Re-Emergence
    Central Asian Energy: Circumventing Russia
    Russian Energy and Foreign Policy
    Russia is moving aggressively to extend its influence throughout the former Soviet empire, while Turkey is rousing itself from 90 years of post-Ottoman isolation. Both are clearly ascendant powers, and it would seem logical that the more the two bump up against one other, the more likely they will gird for yet another round in their centuries-old conflict. But while that may be true down the line, the two Eurasian powers have sufficient strategic incentives to work together for now.

    Russia’s World
    Russia is among the world’s most strategically vulnerable states. Its core, the Moscow region, boasts no geographic barriers to invasion. Russia must thus expand its borders to create the largest possible buffer for its core, which requires forcibly incorporating legions of minorities who do not see themselves as Russian. The Russian government estimates that about 80 percent of Russia’s approximately 140 million people are actually ethnically Russian, but this number is somewhat suspect, as many minorities define themselves based on their use of the Russian language, just as many Hispanics in the United States define themselves by their use of English as their primary language. Thus, ironically, attaining security by creating a strategic buffer creates a new chronic security problem in the form of new populations hostile t o Moscow’s rule. The need to deal with the latter problem explains the development of Russia’s elite intelligence services, which are primarily designed for and tasked with monitoring the country’s multiethnic population.

    (click image to enlarge)
    Russia’s primary challenge, however, is time. In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, the bottom fell out of the Russian birthrate, with fewer than half the number of babies born in the 1990s than were born in the 1980s. These post-Cold War children are now coming of age; in a few years, their small numbers are going to have a catastrophic impact on the size of the Russian population. By contrast, most non-Russian minorities — in particular those such as Chechens and Dagestanis, who are of Muslim faith — did not suffer from the 1990s birthrate plunge, so their numbers are rapidly increasing even as the number of ethnic Russians is rapidly decreasing. Add in deep-rooted, demographic-impacting problems such as HIV, tuberculosis and heroin abuse — concentrated not just among ethnic Russians but a lso among those of childbearing age — and Russia faces a hard-wired demographic time bomb. Put simply, Russia is an ascending power in the short run, but it is a declining power in the long run.

    The Russian leadership is well aware of this coming crisis, and knows it is going to need every scrap of strength it can muster just to continue the struggle to keep Russia in one piece. To this end, Moscow must do everything it can now to secure buffers against external intrusion in the not-so-distant future. For the most part, this means rolling back Western influence wherever and whenever possible, and impressing upon states that would prefer integration into the West that their fates lie with Russia instead. Moscow’s natural gas crisis with Ukraine, August 2008 war with Georgia, efforts to eject American forces from Central Asia and constant pressure on the Baltic states all represent efforts to buy Russia more space — and with that space, more time for survival.

    Expanding its buffer against such a diverse and potentially hostile collection of states is no small order, but Russia does have one major advantage: The security guarantor for nearly all of these countries is the United States, and the United States is currently very busy elsewhere. So long as U.S. ground forces are occupied with the Iraqi and Afghan wars, the Americans will not be riding to the rescue of the states on Russia’s periphery. Given this window of opportunity, the Russians have a fair chance to regain the relative security they seek. In light of the impending demographic catastrophe and the present window of opportunity, the Russians are in quite a hurry to act.

    Turkey’s World
    Turkey is in many ways the polar opposite of Russia. After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, Turkey was pared down to its core, Asia Minor. Within this refuge, Turkey is nearly unassailable. It is surrounded by water on three sides, commands the only maritime connection between the Black and Mediterranean seas and sits astride a plateau surrounded by mountains. This is a very difficult chunk of territory to conquer. Indeed, beginning in the Seljuk Age in the 11th century, the ancestors of the modern Turks took the better part of three centuries to seize this territory from its previous occupant, the Byzantine Empire.

    The Turks have used much of the time since then to consolidate their position such that, as an ethnicity, they reign supreme in their realm. The Persians and Arabs have long since lost their footholds in Anatolia, while the Armenians were finally expelled in the dying days of World War I. Only the Kurds remain, and they do not pose a demographic challenge to the Turks. While Turkey exhibits many of the same demographic tendencies as other advanced developing states — namely, slowing birthrates and a steadily aging population — there is no major discrepancy between Turk and Kurdish birthrates, so the Turks should continue to comprise more than 80 percent of the country’s population for some time to come. Thus, while the Kurds will continue to be a source of nationalistic friction, they do not constitute a fundamental challenge to the power or operations of the Turkish state, like minorities in Russia are destined to do in the years ahead.

    Turkey’s security is not limited to its core lands. Once one moves beyond the borders of modern Turkey, the existential threats the state faced in years past have largely melted away. During the Cold War, Turkey was locked into the NATO structure to protect itself from Soviet power. But now the Soviet Union is gone, and the Balkans and Caucasus — both former Ottoman provinces — are again available for manipulation. The Arabs have not posed a threat to Anatolia in nearly a millennium, and any contest between Turkey and Iran is clearly a battle of unequals in which the Turks hold most of the cards. If anything, the Arabs — who view Iran as a hostile power with not only a heretical religion but also with a revolutionary foreign policy calling for the overthrow of most of the Arab regimes — are practically welcoming the Turks back. Despite both its imperial past and its close security association with the Americans, the Arabs see Turkey as a trusted mediator, and even an exemplar.

    With the disappearance of the threats of yesteryear, many of the things that once held Turkey’s undivided attention have become less important to Ankara. With the Soviet threat gone, NATO is no longer critical. With new markets opening up in the former Soviet Union, Turkey’s obsession with seeking EU membership has faded to a mere passing interest. Turkey has become a free agent, bound by very few relationships or restrictions, but dabbling in events throughout its entire periphery. Unlike Russia, which feels it needs an empire to survive, Turkey is flirting with the idea of an empire simply because it can — and the costs of exploring the option are negl igible.

    Whereas Russia is a state facing a clear series of threats in a very short time frame, Turkey is a state facing a veritable smorgasbord of strategic options under no time pressure whatsoever. Within that disconnect lies the road forward for the two states — and it is a road with surprisingly few clashes ahead in the near term.

    The Field of Competition
    There are four zones of overlapping interest for the Turks and Russians.

    First, the end of the Soviet empire opened up a wealth of economic opportunities, but very few states have proven adept at penetrating the consumer markets of Ukraine and Russia. Somewhat surprisingly, Turkey is one of those few states. Thanks to the legacy of Soviet central planning, Russian and Ukrainian industry have found it difficult to retool away from heavy industry to produce the consumer goods much in demand in their markets. Because most Ukrainians and Russians cannot afford Western goods, Turkey has carved out a robust and lasting niche with its lower-cost exports; it is now the largest supplier of imports to the Russian market. While this is no exercise in hard power, this Turkish penetration nevertheless is cause for much concern among Russian authorities.

    So far, Turkey has been scrupulous about not politicizing these useful trade links beyond some intelligence-gathering efforts (particularly in Ukraine). Considering Russia’s current financial problems, having a stable source of consumer goods — especially one that is not China — is actually seen as a positive. At least for now, the Russian government would rather see its trade relationship with Turkey stay strong. There will certainly be a clash later — either as Russia weakens or as Turkey becomes more ambitious — but for now, the Russians are content with the trade relationship.

    Second, the Russian retreat in the post-Cold War era has opened up the Balkans to Turkish influence. Romania, Bulgaria and the lands of the former Yugoslavia are all former Ottoman possessions, and in their day they formed the most advanced portion of the Ottoman economy. During the Cold War, they were all part of the Communist world, with Romania and Bulgaria formally incorporated into the Soviet bloc. While most of these lands are now absorbed into the European Union, Russia’s ties to its fellow Slavs — most notably the Serbs and Bulgarians — have allowed it a degree of influence that most Europeans choose to ignore. Additionally, Russia has long held a friendly relationship with Greece and Cyprus, both to complicate American policy in Europe and to provide a flank against Turkey. Still, thanks to proximity and trading links, Turkey clearly holds the upper hand in this theater of competition.

    But this particular region is unlikely to generate much Turkish-Russian animosity, simply because both countries are in the process of giving up.

    Most of the Balkan states are already members of an organization that is unlikely to ever admit Russia or Turkey: the European Union. Russia simply cannot meet the membership criteria, and Cyprus’ membership in essence strikes the possibility of Turkish inclusion. (Any EU member can veto the admission of would-be members.) The EU-led splitting of Kosovo from Serbia over Russian objections was a body blow to Russian power in the region, and the subsequent EU running of Kosovo as a protectorate greatly limited Turkish influence as well. Continuing EU expansion means that Turkish influence in the Balkans will shrivel just as Russian influence already has. Trouble this way lies, but not between Turkey and Russia. If anything, their joint exclusion might provide some room for the two to agree on something.

    The third area for Russian-Turkish competition is in energy, and this is where things get particularly sticky. Russia is Turkey’s No. 1 trading partner, with energy accounting for the bulk of the trade volume between the two countries. Turkey depends on Russia for 65 percent of its natural gas and 40 percent of its oil imports. Though Turkey has steadily grown its trade relationship with Russia, it does not exactly approve of Moscow’s penchant for using its energy relations with Europe as a political weapon. Russia has never gone so far as to cut supplies to Turkey directly, but Turkey has been indirectly affected more than once when Russia decided to cut supplies to Ukraine because Moscow felt the need to reassert its writ in Kiev.

    Sharing the Turks’ energy anxiety, the Europeans have been more than eager to use Turkey as an energy transit hub for routes that would bypass the Russians altogether in supplying the European market. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is one such route, and others, like Nabucco, are still stuck in the planning stages. The Russians have every reason to pressure the Turks into staying far away from any more energy diversification schemes that could cost Russia one of its biggest energy clients — and deny Moscow much of the political leverage it currently holds over the Europeans who are dependent on the Russian energy network.

    There are only two options for the Turks in diversifying away from the Russians. The first lies to Turkey’s south in Iraq and Iran. Turkey has big plans for Iraq’s oil industry, but it will still take considerable time to upgrade and restore the oil fields and pipelines that have been persistently sabotaged and ransacked by insurgents during the fighting that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion. The Iranians offer another large source of energy for the Turks to tap into, but the political complications attached to dealing with Iran are still too prickly for the Turks to move ahead with concrete energy deals at this time. Complications remain for now, but Turkey wi ll be keeping an eye on its Middle Eastern neighbors for robust energy partnerships in the future.

    The second potential source of energy for the Turks lies in Central Asia, a region that Russia must keep in its grip at all costs if it hopes to survive in the long run. In many ways this theater is the reverse of the Balkans, where the Russians hold the ethnic links and the Turks the economic advantage. Here, four of the five Central Asian countries — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan — are Turkic. But as a consequence of the Soviet years, the infrastructure and economies of all four are so hardwired into the Russian sphere of influence that it would take some major surgery to liberate them. But the prize is a rich one: Central Asia possesses the world& #8217;s largest concentration of untapped energy reserves. And as the term “central” implies, whoever controls the region can project power into the former Soviet Union, China and South Asia. If the Russians and Turks are going to fight over something, this is it.

    Here Turkey faces a problem, however — it does not directly abut the region. If the Turks are even going to attempt to shift the Central Asian balance of power, they will need a lever. This brings us to the final — and most dynamic — realm of competition: the Caucasus.

    Turkey here faces the best and worst in terms of influence projection. The Azerbaijanis do not consider themselves simply Turkic, like the Central Asians, but actually Turkish. If there is a country in the former Soviet Union that would consider not only allying with but actually joining with another state to escape Russia’s orbit, it would be Azerbaijan with Turkey. Azerbaijan has its own significant energy supplies, but its real value is in serving as a willing springboard for Turkish influence into Central Asia.

    However, the core of Azerbaijan does not border Turkey. Instead, it is on the other side of Armenia, a country that thrashed Azerbaijan in a war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and still has lingering animosities toward Ankara because of the 1915 Armenian “genocide.” Armenia has sold itself to the Russians to keep its Turkish foes at bay.

    This means Turkish designs on Central Asia all boil down to the former Soviet state of Georgia. If Turkey can bring Georgia fully under its wing, Turkey can then set about to integrate with Azerbaijan and project influence into Central Asia. But without Georgia, Turkey is hamstrung before it can even begin to reach for the real prize in Central Asia.

    In this, the Turks do not see the Georgians as much help. The Georgians do not have much in the way of a functional economy or military, and they have consistently overplayed their hand with the Russians in the hopes that the West would come to their aid. Such miscalculations contributed to the August 2008 Georgian-Russian war, in which Russia smashed what military capacity the Georgians did possess. So while Ankara sees the Georgians as reliably anti-Russian, it does not see them as reliably competent or capable.

    This means that Turkish-Russian competition may have been short-circuited before it even began. Meanwhile, the Americans and Russians are beginning to outline the rudiments of a deal. Various items on the table include Russia allowing the Americans to ship military supplies to Afghanistan via Russia’s sphere of influence, changes to the U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) program, and a halt to NATO expansion. The last prong is a critical piece of Russian-Turkish competition. Should the Americans and Europeans put their weight behind NATO expansion, Georgia would be a logical candidate — meaning most of the heavy lifting in terms of Turkey projecting power eastward would already be done. But if the Americans and Europeans do not put their weight behind NATO expansion, Georgia would fall by the wayside and Turkey would have to do all the work of projecting power eastward — and facing the Russians — alone.

    A Temporary Meeting of Minds?
    There is clearly no shortage of friction points between the Turks and the Russians. With the two powers on a resurgent path, it was only a matter of time before they started bumping into one another. The most notable clash occurred when the Russians decided to invade Georgia last August, knowing full well that neither the Americans nor the Europeans would have the will or capability to intervene on behalf of the small Caucasian state. NATO’s strongest response was a symbolic show of force that relied on Turkey, as the gatekeeper to the Black Sea, to allow a buildup of NATO vessels near the Georgian coast and threaten the underbelly of Russia’s former Soviet peri phery.

    Turkey disapproved of the idea of Russian troops bearing down in the Caucasus near the Turkish border, and Ankara was also angered by having its energy revenues cut off during the war when the BTC pipeline was taken offline.

    The Russians promptly responded to Turkey’s NATO maneuvers in the Black Sea by holding up a large amount of Turkish goods at various Russian border checkpoints to put the squeeze on Turkish exports. But the standoff was short-lived; soon enough, the Turks and Russians came to the negotiating table to end the trade spat and sort out their respective spheres of influence. The Russian-Turkish negotiations have progressed over the past several months, with Russian and Turkish leaders now meeting fairly regularly to sort out the issues where both can find some mutual benefit.

    The first area of cooperation is Europe, where both Russia and Turkey have an interest in applying political pressure. Despite Europe’s objections and rejections, the Turks are persistent in their ambitions to become a member of the European Union. At the same time, the Russians need to keep Europe linked into the Russian energy network and divided over any plans for BMD, NATO expansion or any other Western plan that threatens Russian national security. As long as Turkey stalls on any European energy diversification projects, the more it can demand Europe’s attention on the issue of EU membership. In fact, the Turks already threatened as much at the start of the year, when they said outright that if Europe doesn’t need Turkey as an EU member, then Turkey doesn’t need to sign off on any more energy diversification projects that transit Turkish territory. Ankara’s threats against Europe dovetailed nicely with Russia’s natural gas cutoff to Ukraine in January, when the Europeans once again were reminded of Moscow’s energy wrath.

    The Turks and the Russians also can find common ground in the Middle East. Turkey is again expanding its influence deep into its Middle Eastern backyard, and Ankara expects to take the lead in handling the thorny issues of Iran, Iraq and Syria as the United States draws down its presence in the region and shifts its focus to Afghanistan. What the Turks want right now is stability on their southern flank. That means keeping Russia out of mischief in places like Iran, where Moscow has threatened to sell strategic S-300 air defense systems and to boost the Iranian nuclear program in order to grab Washington’s attention on other issues deemed vital to Moscow’s national security interests. The United States is already leaning on Russia to pressure Iran in return for other strategic concessions, and the Turks are just as interested as the Americans in taming Russia’s actions in the Middle East.

    Armenia is another issue where Russia and Turkey may be having a temporary meeting of minds. Russia unofficially occupies Armenia and has been building up a substantial military presence in the small Caucasian state. Turkey can either sit back, continue to isolate Armenia and leave it for the Russians to dominate through and through, or it can move toward normalizing relations with Yerevan and dealing with Russia on more equal footing in the Caucasus. With rumors flying of a deal on the horizon between Yerevan and Ankara (likely with Russia’s blessing), it appears more and more that the Turks and the Russians are making progress in sorting out their respective spheres of influence.

    Ultimately, both Russia and Turkey know that this relationship is likely temporary at best. The two Eurasian powers still distrust each other and have divergent long-term goals, even if in the short term there is a small window of opportunity for Turkish and Russian interests to overlap. The law of geopolitics dictates that the two ascendant powers are doomed to clash — just not today.

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  • Osama bin Elvis

    Osama bin Elvis

    Cover Story

    Where is Osama Bin Laden?

    By Angelo M. Codevilla from the March 2009 issue

    All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama bin Laden. But tell that to the CIA and all the other misconceptualizers of the War on Terror.

    Seven years after Osama bin Laden’s last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence for Elvis’s presence among us than for his. Hence there is reason to ask whether the paradigm of Osama bin Laden as terrorism’s deus ex machina and of al Qaeda as the prototype of terrorism may be an artifact of our Best and Brightest’s imagination, and whether investment in this paradigm has kept our national security establishment from thinking seriously about our troubles’ sources. So let us take a fresh look at the fundamentals.

    Dead or Alive?

    Negative evidence alone compels the conclusion that Osama is long since dead. Since October 2001, when Al Jazeera’s Tayseer Alouni interviewed him, no reputable person reports having seen him—not even after multiple-blind journeys through intermediaries. The audio and video tapes alleged to be Osama’s never convinced impartial observers. The guy just does not look like Osama. Some videos show him with a Semitic aquiline nose, while others show him with a shorter, broader one. Next to that, differences between colors and styles of beard are small stuff.

    Nor does the tapes’ Osama sound like Osama. In 2007 Switzerland’s Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which does computer voice recognition for bank security, compared the voices on 15 undisputed recordings of Osama with the voices on 15 subsequent ones attributed to Osama, to which they added two by native Arab speakers who had trained to imitate him and were reading his writings. All of the purported Osama recordings (with one falling into a gray area) differed clearly from one another as well as from the genuine ones. By contrast, the CIA found all the recordings authentic. It is hard to imagine what methodology might support this conclusion.

    Also in 2007, Professor Bruce Lawrence, who heads Duke University’s religious studies program, argued in a book on Osama’s messages that their increasingly secular language is inconsistent with Osama’s Wahhabism. Lawrence noted as well that the Osama figure in the December 2001 video, which many have taken as his assumption of responsibility for 9/11, wears golden rings—decidedly un-Wahhabi. He also writes with the wrong hand. Lawrence concluded that the messages are fakes, and not very good ones. The CIA has judged them all good.

    Above all, whereas Elvis impersonators at least sing the King’s signature song, “You ain’t nutin’ but a hound dawg,” the words on the Osama tapes differ substantively from what the real Osama used to say—especially about the most important matter. On September 16, 2001, on Al Jazeera, Osama said of 9/11: “I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation.” Again, in the October interview with Tayseer Alouni, he limited his connection with 9/11 to ideology: “If they mean, or if you mean, that there is a link as a result of our incitement, then it is true. We incite…” But in the so-called “confession video” that the CIA found in December, the Osama figure acts like the chief conspirator. The fact that the video had been made for no self-evident purpose except perhaps to be found by the Americans should have raised suspicion. Its substance, the celebratory affirmation of a responsibility for 9/11 that Osama had denied, should also have weighed against the video’s authenticity. Why would he wait to indict himself until after U.S. forces and allies had secured Afghanistan? But the CIA acted as if it had caught Osama red-handed.

    The CIA should also have taken seriously the accounts of Osama’s death. On December 26, 2001, Fox News interviewed a Taliban source who claimed that he had attended Osama’s funeral, along with some 30 associates. The cause of death, he said, had been pulmonary infection. The New York Times on July 11, 2002, reported the consensus of a story widespread in Pakistan that Osama had succumbed the previous year to his long-standing nephritis. Then, Benazir Bhutto—as well connected as anyone with sources of information on the Afghan-Pakistani border—mentioned casually in a BBC interview that Osama had been murdered by his associates. Murder is as likely as natural death. Osama’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is said to have murdered his own predecessor, Abdullah Azzam, Osama’s original mentor. Also, because Osama’s capture by the Americans would have endangered everyone with whom he had ever associated, any and all intelligence services who had ever worked with him had an interest in his death.

    New Osama, Real Osama

    We do not know what happened to Osama. But whatever happened, the original one, the guy who looked and sounded like a spoiled Saudi kid turned ideologue, is no more. The one who exists in the tapes is different: he is the world’s terror master, endowed with inexplicable influence. In short, whoever is making the post-November 2001 Osama tapes is pretending to far greater power than Osama ever claimed, much less exercised.

    The real Osama bin Laden, like the real al Qaeda over which he presided, was never as important as reports from Arab (especially Saudi) intelligence services led the CIA to believe. Osama’s (late) role in Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet resistance was to bring in a little money. Arab fighters in general, and particularly the few Osama brought, fought rarely and badly. In war, one Afghan is worth many Arabs. In 1990 Osama told Saudi regent Abdullah that his mujahideen could stop Saddam’s invasion of the kingdom. When Abdullah waved him away in favor of a half-million U.S. troops, Osama turned dissident, enough to have to move to Sudan, where he stayed until 1996 hatching sterile anti-Saudi plots until forced to move his forlorn band to Afghanistan.

    There is a good reason why neither Osama nor al Qaeda appeared on U.S. intelligence screens until 1998. They had done nothing noteworthy. Since the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, however, and especially after director of Central Intelligence George Tenet imputed responsibility for 9/11 to Osama “game, set, and match,” the CIA described him as terrorism’s prime mover. It refused to countenance the possibility that Osama’s associates might have been using him and his organization as a flag of convenience. As U.S. forces were taking over Afghanistan in 2001, the CIA was telling Time and Newsweek that it expected to find the high-tech headquarters from which Osama controlled terrorist activities in 50 countries. None existed. In November 2008, without factual basis and contrary to reason, the CIA continued to describe him and his organization as “the most clear and present danger to the United States.” It did not try to explain how this could be while, it said, Osama is “largely isolated from the day to day operations of the organization he nominally heads.” What organization?

    Axiom and Opposite

    Why such a focus on an organization that was never large, most of whose known associates have long since been killed or captured, and whose assets the CIA does not even try to catalogue? The CIA’s official explanation, that al Qaeda has “metastasized” by spreading its expertise, is an empty metaphor. But pursuant to it, the U.S. government accepted the self-designation as “al Qaeda” of persons fighting for Sunni-Baathist interests in Iraq, and has pinned the label gratuitously on sundry high-profile terrorists while acknowledging that their connection to Osama and Co. may be emotional at most. But why such gymnastics in the face of Osama’s incontrovertible irrelevance? Because focusing on Osama and al Qaeda affirms a CIA axiom dating from the Cold War, an axiom challenged during the Reagan years but that has been U.S. policy since 1993, namely: terrorism is the work of “rogue individuals and groups” that operate despite state authority. According to this axiom, the likes of Osama run rings around the intelligence services of Arab states—just like the Cold War terrorists who came through Eastern Europe to bomb in Germany and Italy and to shoot Pope John Paul II supposedly acted despite Bulgarian intelligence, despite East Germany’s Stasi, despite the KGB. This axiom is dear to many in the U.S. government because it leads logically to working with the countries whence terrorists come rather than to treating them as enemies.

    But what if terrorism were (as Thomas Friedman put it) “what states want to happen or let happen”? What if, in the real world, infiltrators from intelligence services—the professionals—use the amateur terrorists rather than the other way around? What is the logical consequence of noting the fact that the terrorist groups that make a difference on planet Earth—such as Hamas and Hezbollah, the PLO, Colombia’s FARC—are extensions of, respectively, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and Venezuela? It is the negation of the U.S. government’s favorite axiom. It means that when George W. Bush spoke, and when Barack Obama speaks, of America being “at war” against “extremism” or “extremists” they are either being stupid or acting stupid to avoid dealing with the nasty fact that many governments wage indirect warfare.

    In short, insisting on Osama’s supposed mastery of al Qaeda, and on equating terrorism with al Qaeda, is official U.S. policy because it forecloses questions about the role of states, and makes it possible to indict as warmongers whoever raises such questions. Osama’s de facto irrelevance for seven years, however, has undermined that policy’s intellectual legitimacy. How much longer can presidents or directors of the CIA wave the spectra of Osama and al Qaeda before people laugh at them?

    An Intellectual House of Cards

    Questioning osama’s relevance to today’s terrorism leads naturally to asking how relevant he ever was, and who might be more relevant. That in turn quickly shows how flimsy are the factual foundations on which rest the U.S. government’s axioms about the “war on terror.” Consider: We know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) planned and carried out 9/11. But there is no independent support for KSM’s claim that he acted at Osama’s direction and under his supervision. On the contrary, we know for sure that the expertise and the financing for 9/11 came from KSM’s own group (the U.S. government has accepted but to my knowledge not verified that the group’s core is a biological family of Baluchs). This group carried out the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and every other act for which al Qaeda became known. The KSM group included the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings Abdul Rahman Yasin, who came from, returned to, and vanished in Iraq, as well as Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bombing, who came to the U.S. from Iraq on an Iraqi passport and was known to his New York collaborators as “Rashid the Iraqi.” This group had planned the bombing of U.S. airliners over the Pacific in 1995. The core members are non-Arabs. They had no history of religiosity (and the religiosity they now display is unconvincing). They were not creatures of Osama. Only in 1996 did the group come to Osama’s no-account band, and make it count.

    In life, as in math, you must judge the function |of a factor in any equation by factoring it out and seeing if the equation still works. Factor out Osama. Chances are, 9/11 still happens. Factor out al Qaeda too. Maybe 9/11 still happens. The other bombing plots sure happened without it. But if you factor out the KSM group, surely there is no 9/11, and without the KSM group, there is no way al Qaeda would have become a household word.

    Who, precisely, are KSM and his reputed nephews? That is an interesting question to which we do not know the answer, and are not about to find out. Ramzi Yousef was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing after a trial that focused on his guilt and that abstracted from his associations. Were our military tribunal to accede to KSM’s plea of guilty, he would avoid any trial at all. Moreover, the sort of trial that would take place before the tribunal would focus on proving guilt rather than on getting at the whole truth. It would not feature the cross-examination of witnesses, the substantive proving and impeachment of evidence, and the exploration of alternative explanations of events. But real trials try all sides. Do we need such things given that KSM confessed? Yes. There is no excuse for confusing confessions with truth, especially confessions in which the prisoners confirm our agencies’ prejudices.

    The excuse for limiting the public scrutiny of evidence is the alleged need to protect intelligence sources. But my experience, as well as that of others who have been in a position to probe such claims, is that almost invariably they protect our intelligence agencies’ incompetence and bureaucratic interests. Anyhow, the public’s interest in understanding what it’s up against should override all others.

    Understanding the Past, Dealing With the Future

    Focusing on Osama bin Elvis is dangerous to America’s security precisely because it continues to substitute in our collective mind the soft myth that terrorism is the work of romantic rogues for the hard reality that it can happen only because certain states want it to happen or let it happen. KSM and company may not have started their careers as agents of Iraqi intelligence, or they may have quit the Iraqis and worked for others, or maybe they just worked for themselves. But surely they were a body unto themselves. As such they fit Osama’s description of those responsible for 9/11 as “individuals with their own motivation” far better than they fit the CIA’s description of them as Osama’s tools.

    More important, focusing on Osama and al Qaeda distorts our understanding of what is happening in Afghanistan. The latter-day Taliban are fielding forces better paid and armed than any in the region except America’s. Does anyone suggest seriously that Osama or al-Zawahiri are providing the equipment, the money, or the moral incentives? Such amounts of money can come only from the super wealthy of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The equipment can come only through dealers who work at the sufferance of states, and can reach the front only through Pakistan by leave of Pakistani authorities. Moreover, the moral incentives for large-scale fighting in Pushtunistan can come only as part of the politics of Pushtun identity. Hence sending troops to Afghanistan to fight Pushtuns financed by Saudis, supported by Pakistanis, and disposing of equipment purchased throughout the world, with the objective of “building an Afghan nation” capable of preventing Osama and al Qaeda from messing up the world from their mountain caves, is an errand built on intellectual self-indulgence.

    Intellectual Authority

    The CIA had as much basis for deeming Osama the world’s terror master “game, set, and match” in 2001 as it had in 2003 for verifying as a “slam dunk” the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and as it had in 2007 for determining that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. Mutatis mutandis, it was on such bases that the CIA determined in 1962 that the Soviets would not put missiles in Cuba; that the CIA was certain from 1963 to 1978 that the USSR would not build the first strike missile force that it was building before its very eyes; that the CIA convinced Bush 41 that the Soviet Union was not falling apart and that he should help hold it together; that the CIA assured the U.S. government in 1990 that Iraq would not invade Kuwait, and in 1996 that neither India nor Pakistan would test nuclear weapons. In these and countless other instances, the CIA has provided the US government and the media with authoritative bases for denying realities over which America was tripping.

    The force of the CIA’s judgments, its authority, has always come from the congruence between its prejudices and those of America’s ruling class. When you tell people what they want to hear, you don’t have to be too careful about premises, facts, and conclusions. Our problem, in short, is not the CIA’s mentality so much as the unwillingness of persons in government and the “attentive public” to exercise intellectual due diligence about international affairs. Osama bin Laden’s role may be as good a place as any to start.

    Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, and a senior editor of The American Spectator, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985. He was the principal author of the 1980 presidential transition report on intelligence. He is the author of The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility.

    Source:  The American Spectator, March 2009

  • 2009 ANNUAL DUES, DONATIONS and Book Sales

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