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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (11838)	2/13/2006 11:53:44 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541595

Musharraf is not a nutter, but it is always possible that Islamists will take over Pakistan. However, that is not the same thing as Islamists having already taken over Pakistan. Furthermore, there is one big, near thing that will always occupy Pakistan's attention more than small, far away Israel, and that's India.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (11838)	2/14/2006 12:33:11 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541595

Well, if you really want to learn more, you will google AND read- that is, imo, the best way to get information. Reading alone, while interesting, or entertaining, rarely gives you the breadth you can get when you google a topic and then read or skim the material in 25-50 hits. Just my opinion, of course.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (11838)	2/14/2006 8:36:56 AM
From: MrLucky	Respond to of 541595

Here is an opinion on Putin. Putin's KGB Instincts Serve Russia Badly WSJ.com GLOBAL VIEW By GEORGE MELLOAN February 14, 2006; Page A23 How Vladimir Putin persuaded Boris Yeltsin to yield him power six years ago remains something of a mystery. No doubt he drew on the knowledge he acquired in his rise to the top of the secret police and was helped by his offer to grant the Yeltsin family freedom from prosecution for corruption. Skills in political intrigue can be very useful in obtaining and holding power. But they haven't been well suited for delivering to the Russian people a modern, democratic state. President Putin's baser instincts have been on display in recent weeks, perhaps because he is buoyed by the high prices for Russia's main exports, oil and gas. On a visit to Spain's socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero Thursday he said the Hamas terrorists who won the recent Palestinian election will be welcome in Moscow. So much for the efforts of his U.S. and European "road map" partners to keep Hamas at arm's length until it promises peaceful coexistence with Israel. Iran's murderous mullahs also have been invited to Moscow to discuss having the spent fuel from their Russian-built nuclear-power plant reprocessed in Russia. Mr. Putin sold this idea to the West as a means of preventing the mullahs from developing a nuclear weapon. But it does no such thing. The Iranians can upgrade uranium to weapons grade independently of such a deal with the centrifuges they are installing. Mr. Putin recently boasted that Russia now has a nuclear missile that can penetrate a missile defense. The only missile defense extant is the one being developed by the U.S., so this was a belated jibe at the U.S. for its 2001 scuttling of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Missile rattling used to be common practice in the old Soviet Union, but now we hear it again at a time when the U.S. and Russia are presumed to be at peace. Maybe energy riches have gone to Mr. Putin's head. But he also seems to have been badly shaken by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine of just over a year ago. His response has been to further crack down on free expression in Russia and use strong-arm tactics against former members of the Russian empire. In Soviet times when the empire was threatened the Russians sent tanks, as to Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the borders of Poland in 1981. Today they use other methods, such as cutting off gas supplies to Ukraine in the dead of winter and -- so Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili believes -- arranging the sabotage of energy infrastructure serving his tiny state. Russia, of course, denies any political pressure, saying that it is only trying to obtain "market" prices for the natural gas its Gazprom monopoly supplies. Yet it's hard to live down a KGB past. Reports are circulating in the Baltic states of secret Russian support for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and newspapers that back pro-Russian political candidates there. Mr. Putin has grown increasingly sarcastic in his references to the independent states that were once Soviet republics, reflecting a reluctance by Russian hard-liners to admit that the former empire is no more. Mr. Putin's efforts to prevent Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution and Ukraine's Orange Revolution proved to be fiascos, but Russia continues to stonewall Georgia's demands that it stop subverting the Tbilisi government through its military and secret-police operations in Georgia's Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions. In Russia's defense, it could be argued that the U.S. has been encroaching on its former empire. The three formerly Soviet Baltic states are now members of NATO. Ukraine and Georgia want to join as well to gain the protection of the alliance. The U.S. has a military-training mission in Georgia and an airbase in Kyrgyzstan for supplying aid to Afghanistan. But not all empires are alike. The states that want to sign up with the Americans are democracies that chose the West mainly to get out from under Moscow's thumb. The Soviet Union was never a true "union" but an empire held together by the Red Army and the KGB (which now goes by the initials FSB) using men like Vladimir Putin to snoop on and threaten anyone inclined toward dissent. Russia wasn't a happy place under the Soviet yoke and is not a very happy place today, either, even though its people are much freer than under the Soviets. Fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR and the efforts by Mr. Yeltsin to set up a constitutional democracy, the Kremlin has reverted back to some of its old ways. It controls TV broadcasting, even putting disinformation out on the airwaves, according to some sources. Russian demographics are atrocious, with a high mortality rate and low birth rate. The World Bank has estimated that if current trends continue, its population could shrink to 119 million from 144 million by 2050. It is trying, not very successfully, to lure ethnic Russians living abroad to return to the motherland. The economic growth that Mr. Putin boasts of is mostly the result of higher oil and gas prices. Irina E. Yasina, daughter of a former economics minister and now head of an NGO endowed by the former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, told Journal editors not long ago that the conditions necessary for private enterprises to sprout and grow still don't exist in Russia. One key necessity is a rule of law to ensure that contracts can be enforced and that property won't be confiscated, as was that of Mr. Khodorkovsky. Empires endure when they reward people with trade and commerce and a degree of freedom. Russia has just passed a law curtailing the activities of NGOs and further suppressing development of a genuine civil society. Its empire has little attraction except to dictators in Belarus and Uzbekistan trying to ward off democratic forces. Russia's president came up through a cruel system and it may be that nothing he learned as a secret policeman taught him how to shape a modern state, let alone restore the Russian empire.