When Energy Comes From Russia, It's Also Power nytimes.com
The other side of the coin on the "Russian Savior" front. That anybody would consider ex-KGB head and W buddy "Pootie Poot" to be a model of stability, compared to the rather long history of the US-Saudi mutual interest, well, wishful thinking isn't exactly uncommon among the "War Now!" crowd. Anyway, the biased NYT cites one of those nefarious liberal sources it's always relying on:
In Mr. Putin, Russia's new oil barons have a leader willing to press their interests. "Putin is a master of making more out of what he actually has," said James Richard, a co-author of an essay this spring in the journal Foreign Affairs that asserted that "the contest for energy dominance between the world's two largest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia and Russia," will have "fundamental consequences for the world's economy."
More concretely:
This strategic partnership is based on mutual interest, the two-way street of any relationship. And just as the United States and Europe welcome the freedom of action they get from Russia's more muscular presence in the oil market, Mr. Putin welcomes new opportunities for Russia, above all that Russian interests should be taken into account on the big issues of war and commerce.
SO it is more than interesting that Mr. Putin has positioned himself between America and each of the states Mr. Bush counts as the "axis of evil." He has parlayed with North Korea's Kim Jong-il to press the Western agenda of arms control, while selling to both Koreas the concept of a common market that would connect them with Europe via Russia's rails.
In Iran, he has pursued the Russian power industry's interests, negotiating deals to sell nuclear power stations after Russian engineers complete their long delayed unit at Bushehr. As a partner with the West, he gets the right to argue Russian commercial interests in Iran, even as the Bush administration denounces Iran's support for terrorism and its quest for nuclear weapons.
And in the confrontation with Iraq, Mr. Putin has adopted the American position that Saddam Hussein must open his borders to United Nations inspectors or face the consequences. Still, he has kept the lines open to Baghdad to hold onto multibillion-dollar contracts to develop new Iraqi oil fields. And Russia, whose equipment built Iraq's army, is likely to supply Saddam's successor, perhaps in competition with the West.
In other words, the concept of a resurgent Russian state providing energy security for the West is beginning to work to Russia's benefit, and the gains for Russia are palpable. In part because of President Putin's relationship with President Bush, the concept seems less threatening than most forecasts for Russia did a few years ago, even if Russia's new vibrance does not quite radiate to the grumpy shores of the Persian Gulf.
Which is all fine and everything, international relations work a lot better when they're based on mutual national interests. But the US might, just might, have other national interests than bogging itself down to the maximum extent in war and occupation in the mideast.
Meanwhile, on the Saudis "fomenting and exporting the ideology that ultimately places our oil interests at risk in the ME", I got to go back to a different piece, from 1996, which has the virtue of distance from the current propaganda campaign. The timing makes the prescience of this article quite impressive. Remember "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers"? It's hard to say, exactly, but it's sort of doubtful the (historically rather timid in external affairs ) Saudis, on their own could have come up with the Jihad thing in Afghanistan. The CIA had a lot more experience in that kind of effort. A much recycled blast from the past:
SIXTEEN years have passed since the CIA began providing weapons and funds -- eventually totaling more than $3 billion -- to a fratricidal alliance of seven Afghan resistance groups, none of whose leaders are by nature democratic, and all of which are fundamentalist in religion to some extent, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. Washington's financial commitment to the jihad was exceeded only by Saudi Arabia's. At the time the jihad was getting under way there was no significant Islamist opposition movement in Saudi Arabia, and it apparently never occurred to the Saudi rulers, who feared the Soviets as much as Washington did, that the volunteers it sent might be converted by the jihad's ideology. Therein lies the greatest paradox of the bombing in Riyadh: it and the explosions in Peshawar and Islamabad could well prove to be part of the negative fallout -- or "blowback," in intelligence parlance -- of the U.S.- and Saudi-orchestrated Afghan jihad.
The bombings -- the first such terrorist attack in Saudi history, and among the worst in Pakistan's -- were the clearest warnings yet of an ominous escalation in the conflicts between the governments in Cairo and Riyadh and their Islamist foes. And the carnage in Islamabad -- the fourth attack against the Egyptian govrnment abroad in recent months (Mubarak narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa) -- indicated that Egypt's militant Islamic groups, facing an increasingly vengeful crackdown at home, were transferring their four-year-old war to the international front. U.S. policymakers were stunned. In less than a week the vulnerabilities of three of Washington's pivotal regional allies had become clear.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan had all served U.S. interests during the jihad Afghanistan; none appears able to cope with its aftermath. Mubarak's anger was palpable when he told me, months before the bombings, that he laid the blame for Islamist terrorism squarely on Pakistan, for, in his words, failing to "clean up" Peshawar and its environs. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's bewilderment after the bombings was evident, as she once again faulted the United States and the CIA, which she accused of continuing to finance Pakistan's radical Muslim clerics and fundamentalist groups. As for the rulers of Saudi Arabia, whose princes and foundations, ironically, remain the leading benefactors of many of the militant Islamic groups in a shortsighted attempt to placate the kingdom's expanding fundamentalist constituency, they seemed shaken out of their placidity. And government officials in all three capitals began to wonder, as they redoubled their efforts against terrorism, whether the Islamists could still be contained.
For more than a decade some 25,000 Islamic militants, from nearly thirty countries around the world, had streamed through Peshawar on their way to the jihad. They came, without passports and without names, from the Palestinian organization Hamas, from Egypt's AlGama'a al-Islamiya and Al-Jihad, from Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, and from the Philippines' Moro Liberation Front. Five years after the jihad ended, a thousand or so remained, some in Peshawar itself, others encamped in the mountain passes of the ungovernable tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, planning and executing what investigators now believe were terrorist acts that have reached from Cairo to Algiers, Manila to Bangkok -- and to the streets of Islamabad. Riyadh, Peshawar, and New York.
"Even today you can sit at the Khyber Pass and see every color, every creed, every nationality, pass," a Western diplomat told me in Peshawar last spring. "These groups, in their wildest imagination, never would have met if there had been no jihad. For a Moro to get a Sting missile! To make contacts with Islamists from North Africa! The United States created a Moscow Central in Peshawar for these groups, and the consequences for all of us are astronomical."
The diplomat went on to say that many veterans of the Afghan jihad have set up an informal network of small, loosely organized underground cells, with support centers scattered around the world: in the United States, the Persian Gulf countries, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The days of mule trains like the one Sheikh Omar joined en route to Afghanistan are long gone; now E-mail and faxes drive the jihad. theatlantic.com |
