22 Comments

1. Barbara Skolaut:

The US is right to be concerned about these Soviet (er, I mean Russian) arms being used against our military in Iraq.

What I find puzzling is that Putin isn’t worried they might be used against Russian soldiers in Chechnya – or Russia.

I realise he probably has “assurances” from Boy Assad that it won’t happen, but he surely can’t be stupid enough to believe him.

Jan 12, 2005 - 8:52 pm 2. chuck:

I guess is that this will move Syria up the list of problems to be ’solved.’ Wonder how we will go about it?

Jan 12, 2005 - 9:11 pm 3. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Russia under Putin is indeed becoming a threat to the US. I don’t know how much of it is Putin trying to get back into the great power game, and how much is simply the money involved in selling arms. I fear too much is the former.

Russia seems to be sliding into fascism, which is something I thought would happen 10 years ago. They surprised me.

Syria is a problem to be solved. The way to turn Iraq into “Vietnam” is to allow a safe sanctuary for the enemy, and that is what Syria is.

I expect we are going to have to bomb Syria, and maybe send in some forces in various areas. And Lebanon logically should be liberated, but I don’t know whether it would blow up if it happened.

Attack’s on Syria’s military and it’s transport facilities would be appropriate. Likewise, an attack designed to punish certain organs of government might destabilize the regime.

It is unfortunate that the rest of the “civilized” world is uninterested in these issues, and will simply use any such attacks to further attack us. Iran has got to be stopped and very soon. Syrian support for the “resistance” has to be stopped also.

Syria is currently at war with us, sending in fighters and equipment used to attack our people and innocent iraqis. It’s time to recognize that state of affairs and respond accordingly. I think attempted decapitation attacks on Assad would also send a nice message, even if we always seem to miss with those.

Jan 12, 2005 - 9:22 pm 4. Katherine:

Putin needs money badly, and would probably sell his mother and his soul to have means to stay in power.

But I suspect that the primary reason for this sale is to check our ability to act in the ME. Both Assad and Putin know that we have to do something about Syria, and neither of them want us to be able to do it.

It is not only France that is trying to cut us down to size. Russia is not our friend, either.

Jan 12, 2005 - 9:31 pm 5. Kevin P:

Roger:

Putin is ex-KGB and Russia is sliding back into dictatorship as Putin is using the horrid economic and security situation to remove the democratic reforms that were started after the fall of the USSR. Putin has dreams of Russia as a superpower and these are his first steps to achieve that goal.

Jan 12, 2005 - 10:55 pm 6. David Gillies:

From a Realpolitik point of view, use of an SA-18 against Coalition forces in Iraq by Ba’athist terrorists is casus belli against Syria. Would losing an aircraft so we could crush Syria and massacre the Sunni insurgency be worth it? Way above my pay grade.

Better still, of course, would be capture of a unit, since apparently we have the serial numbers.

Jan 13, 2005 - 1:44 am 7. David Thomson:

ìI guess is that this will move Syria up the list of problems to be ’solved.’ Wonder how we will go about it?î

Syria must be the next domino to fall. We should invade the country in the very near future. President Bashar Assad has apparently not heeded our warning. He will now pay the price. This invasion should take place right after the Iraqi elections. What about approval from the US Senate? The Syrians have been assisting the terrorists in Iraq. That alone is sufficient to justify an invasion.

Jan 13, 2005 - 3:34 am 8. PeterUK:

Russia is merely continuing the “Great Game” that it has always been involved in no matter which regime is in power,the players have changed but the game goes on.It is about time a knowledge of 19th century history was made a pre-requisite for office.

Jan 13, 2005 - 5:31 am 9. Curmudgeon:

I really doubt that pecuniary considerations come into play in Putin’s thinking. Even if this is called a sale, it’s almost certainly on the cuff, and Syria’s ability to pay is virtually non-existent.

Jan 13, 2005 - 6:06 am 10. Cynic:

Whatever the US has to do will be complicated by the EU (France).

http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/06/france_and_syri.html

“Interesting article (via Roger L. Simon) on France and its continuing love affair with Baathist regimes:”

Jan 13, 2005 - 7:06 am 11. thibaud:

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I can’t recall an instance in which the vaunted S-10 air defense system was ever used successfully against any western military. If I’m correct, then thirty years of failure doesn’t seem to me to be a major reason for concern.

OTOH the shoulder-launched missiles are precisely the kind of asymmetric weapon that can pose a major threat to all kinds of aircraft, including commercial jets. Supplying these to one of the terror-masters gives the lie to Putin’s supposed hostility to terror.

It’s becoming clear that Putin’s Russia is a failing state propped up by $40+/bbl oil. When oil falls significantly again to the $10-15 range, as it did as recently as 1998, Russia will once again see its economic growth grind to a halt and its governmental effectiveness, such as it is, will once again collapse. When that happens we’ll be looking at Pakistan North, with the FSB in the role of the ISI and Putin as a more hapless version of Musharraf.

Bottom line is that we need to focus on Russia with the same degree of intensity as we applied to Pakistan post-911. Russia holds the keys to the greatest WMD candystore in the world, and if we don’t apply a form of tough love to Volodya and his FSB-mafiosi gangbangers, we’ll have yet another failed state to deal with.

Jan 13, 2005 - 8:33 am 12. thibaud:

My $0.02 worth from having worked in and lived through the Russian tragicomedy in recent years:

Russia is not “sliding into fascism”. Fascism requires a disciplined party organization, and Putin commands no organization to speak of, let alone a party, let alone a disciplined party with any sense of where it wants to take the nation. And the nation itself has neither a civil society nor anything like a government that can govern. Putin’s merely starting to fill a vacuum that the CPSU’s collapse and Yeltsin and Gorbachev’s massive incompetence created.

A much better analogy for contemporary Russia is the third-world kleptocratic one. Think Brazil or Nigeria, not Weimar. Putin is a puppet surrounded by shifting coalitions of corrupt biznessmeny (not to be confused with capitalists– the latter invest, the former simply strip assets) engaged mainly in the Great Game of arbitraging the state and kleptocratic ministry and security service and local government officials who also are engaged mainly in the Great Arbitrage-the-State Game.

This is Collor’s Brazil, but without anything like a coherent trade union movement or Church or middle class. Unlike Weimar or post-WWI Italy, there is in Russia today nothing like an established social order or an effective or coherent state bureaucracy that a fascist movement would have to co-opt into a corporatist governing structure.

The upshot is that not only are there are no brakes on Putin, but Putin himself is barely in charge. Real authority in Russia almost certainly resides with corrupt security services aligned with resource-trading mafiosi. And their favorite destination for money-laundering and deal-making is the middle east: formerly Cyprus, recently and currently Dubai and Baghdad (and probably Tehran), to which we can now add Damascus. Red sky in the morning.

Jan 13, 2005 - 8:48 am 13. thibaud:

Another reason not to employ the fascist analogy to Putin’s Russia: the two key features of fascist ideology and m.o. are the cult of violence and a national supremacy defined in racial terms. Which both imply a concerted campaign of party-directed violence against racial minorities. The abusive treatment of southerners from the Caucasus has long been a feature of Moscow society; this accelerated under the Richard Daley-style kleptocratic mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, during the 1990s, and has zip to do with Putin.

In fact, Putin has done more than any Russian leader in history to ensure tolerance for and fair treatment of Russia’s jews. One could argue that he’s doing Russia’s jewish minority a favor by clamping down on the, unfortunately, overwhelmingly jewish circle of “oligarch” thieves, swindlers and murderers who grabbed assets representing nearly 40% of Russia’s GDP under Yeltsin.

The problem in Russia is not that the government is too strong but that it barely governs at all. Nigeria, not Weimar.

Jan 13, 2005 - 9:49 am 14. Katherine:

Thibaud,

In other words, Russia is a case study for a democratic system functioning in the absence of property rights and the rule of law, as we understand it. Which does not negate the contentions that Russia is as eager to play the Great Game as ever.

Jan 13, 2005 - 10:34 am 15. Kevin P:

Thibaud:

I agree that Russia is not a fascist state at the moment but the fact that Putin is unilaterally removing agreed upon election procedures, ie the elections of govenors, is a sign that he is setting up a strong man dictatorship style of government. He may be just a figurehead in a KGB(or NKVD,or cheka or whatever the current letterhead for the Russian secret police) directed government. Even acknowleging the massive corruption of the Yeltsin era the fact that the government is now in control of virtually all of the media outlets in Russia and is slowly taking control of the electoral process is the beginnings of a individual or clique style dictatorship. What we can do about it is beyond my imagination.

Regarding his treatment of the Jews remember that at various times Lenin and Stalin initiated generous treatment of the Jewish people that was yanked away when Stalins inbred anti-semitism took over. The fact that he had complete control of all aspects of government, media, and business made that decision easy. Putin is not even close to that type of control but he is initiating the building blocks of that type of system and the fact that some elements of the Russian population look back lovingly on the era when the USSR strode the world as a giant and was not an international joke is very scary to me.

Jan 13, 2005 - 11:15 am 16. thibaud:

Katharine,

There are indeed property rights– in fact over 65% of Russia’s economy is in private hands, and Russians are doing a very brisk business in buying and selling their apartments– but there is no effective rule of law.

An odd combination, I know, but then Russian capitalism isn’t really capitalism. You can’t have capitalism if you don’t have real banks or other financial intermediaries that channel savings into productive investments. Instead, nearly all Russian savings are either stuffed under mattresses or sent overseas. This is mainly a cash-based economy– not such a bad thing, as no one pays attention to accounting games the way they do here– but the principal consequences for Russian society are that

1) no one has any commitment to or faith in the future, and

2) the economy and budget are 100% dependent on the export of commodities, mainly oil, gas and a few minerals and metals.

When commodity prices are high, Russia can coast. Lots of cash for Moscow and a slight bump up for the miserably poor who make up the majority everywhere else.

When commodity prices fall, Russia collapses. This is the same kind of third world seesaw that Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria etc have been riding for a century. Those are the relevant comparisons for Russia IMHO– with the added overlays of the WMD candystore and the arab-Dubai connections.

Jan 13, 2005 - 11:18 am 17. thibaud:

Kevin, I’m not minimizing the threat; in fact I think it’s in many ways much worse than we imagine. But the nature of the threat is not so dissimilar to what we’re dealing with now in Pakistan. We need to get over the notion that the Russian polity– not the people, not the culture, but the way Russia is governed and how decisions are made– is a normal or normalizing one.

Samuel Huntington famously distinguished between “orderly” societies, which he described as those in which “the government governs”, and those in which the government is incapable of delivering basic goods and generally pursuing policy goals in a coherent and disciplined manner. The Soviet Union was orderly; today’s Russia is not.

Putin is Musharraf in whiteface. We need to start approaching Russia as a third world, failing state. As someone with Russian family, I find this is humiliating and depressing beyond words, but there it is.

Jan 13, 2005 - 11:26 am 18. Anthony Ragan:

David,

Syria must be the next domino to fall. We should invade the country in the very near future.

With what? Thanks to Bush the Elder and Former President Bubba, our Army was reduced from 18 divisions to the ten we had just before the liberation of Iraq. We simply don’t have the forces to invade and occupy another country while maintaining our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I agree Syria needs a hard crack on the head, however. They likely received some of Saddam’s WMDs before the war, and they’re definitely providing shelter and aid to the former Baathist leaders who are directing the head-choppers in Iraq. That cannot go unpunished.

The question is, how?

Jan 13, 2005 - 11:36 am 19. thibaud:

Post-election, why can’t we redeploy troops toward

a) the highways and

b) the border with Syria, with support from the peshmerga?

The first phase of the war is over. The next phase should be Iraqi Democrats vs Iraqi Fascists, not a continuation of a US counterinsurgency effort. Give the Iraqis prime responsibility for defending their own nascent democracy (albeit with a decent-sized US contingent in Baghdad) and help them defeat foreign-based and -supplied ba’athists with the above deployment strategy.

Jan 13, 2005 - 11:42 am 20. thibaud:

Anders Aslund is a smart guy who knows Russia. Here’s his take (my emphasis added):

It should come as no surprise that Yukos, Beslan, and Ukraine were hardly freak accidents. Instead, they were the fruit of Putin’s extreme centralization of decisionmaking, his systematic use of disinformation, and his abolition of all corrective mechanisms, compounded by great personal stubbornness.

Like Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, Putin has drained all power out of the formal institutions of government. His legitimacy resides only in his popularity, which will inevitably crumble after he has alienated most elites and paralyzed his government. The Putin regime has too narrow a base and is too ineffective to last. Although it is hard to predict how fast it will collapse or what will replace it, the regime is likely to unravel sooner than anybody now dares to suggest.

But Aslund’s prognosis is more sanguine, or less sanguinary, than mine. He compares Putin’s authoritarianism to Gorbachev’s:

…Ironically, Putin is forcing U.S. policy toward Russia to come full circle, back to where it was in the late Soviet period. Once again, the United States must manage the decline of a mildly authoritarian regime armed with nuclear weapons. It should be possible to do this without causing any great harm, but we should harbor no illusion that this colossus with feet of clay [Bismarck's phrase about late 19c Russia-t.] will stand up and fight with us in the war on terror.

The problem is that there is no CPSU anymore, and in its wake no effective state institutions have risen to take its place. The Duma is feckless, ditto for the courts. The army is a disaster. The security services run wild and are thoroughly corrupted. The economics ministry has a few competent officials now but the strong leaders were purged months ago. No one’s really guarding the borders and whether the WMD stocks are effectively guarded is anyone’s guess. (My own is that WMD supplies are being trafficked through the FSB/mafiya’s favorite offshore venue, Dubai.)

This is not another Soviet Union; this is something not seen since 1917, with a third-world twist. It is a failing state, this time with WMD stocks for the taking. Aslund’s optimism is misplaced.

Jan 13, 2005 - 12:07 pm 21. Terrye:

Putin is strange. On one hand he tells Bush that not only does he believe Saddam has weapons, he also believes Saddam is planning to launch attacks in the US…and then he opposes the invasion.

He supports Bush’s reelection and yet he is pursuing a policy that is not helpful to Bush in anyway.

I think thibauld is right here. This man does not have the control we think he has.

Jan 13, 2005 - 12:26 pm 22. thibaud:

He’s a transitional figure. A clown, really.

Jan 13, 2005 - 12:34 pm

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