DANCES WITH
BEARS Russia revels in US's
woes By John Helmer
MOSCOW - Nuri Said was the puppet
prime minister of Iraq during the 1950s, when the
British pulled all the strings in Baghdad. When he was
toppled by revolutionary Iraqi officers in 1958, Said's
mangled corpse was dragged through the streets. His end
more or less confirmed what he used to say: "You can
always rent an Arab, but you can never buy him." The
Bush administration is filled with
men with short memories who won't have heard of
Nuri Pasha, and aren't in the frame of mind to listen to
his advice.
Asia Times Online told this story in
September of 2002 (Russia rooting for a quick hit on
Saddam), and 18 months later it deserves to
be repeated, especially after Said's gruesome fate
recently befell four American security men at the hands
of an Iraqi mob in the town of Fallujah. Since their
intensely televised death and dismemberment, the
American occupation forces have faced surging rebellions
by the two major communities of Iraq, the Sunnis and the
Shi'ites. Their attacks have also targeted foreign
civilians, pseudo-civilians, and soldiers of fortune in
Iraq, forcing widespread evacuations.
For the
first time, the US military leadership in Washington,
fearing the political consequences of adding fresh,
inexperienced US forces to Iraq, has cancelled the
one-year rotation agreement it had with its troops,
extending their service in the war zone for another
three months. Rotation was a scheme devised by the White
House to limit the extent to which unpopular and
unwinnable wars might provoke mutiny in the ranks, and
votes against the president at home. The one-year
rotation failed to staunch the crack-up of the US Army
in Vietnam, but neither presidents Lyndon Johnson nor
Richard Nixon dared to cancel the rotation promise.
The political calculation by President George W
Bush is that, even if the disgruntled families of the
20,000 troops affected immediately - one in every seven
in Iraq - vote against him later this year in the
presidential elections, that will still add up to fewer
votes against him than if he adds 20,000 new troops who
begin to suffer casualties.
The military
calculation is that it will not be possible to preserve
the US position in Iraq by paying local Iraqis to
replace departing US forces. They must stay to fight; or
they must retreat. The recent fighting has demonstrated
for all to see that Said's warning has returned to haunt
those who ignored it. The Iraqis whom Washington has
rented will never risk Said's fate. And so, win or lose
against Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, Bush has
started down the slope that once defeated Johnson and
Nixon, and put a brief stop to Washington's imperial
ambitions.
That's a slope which Russian policy
has no interest in either precipitating or accelerating
- so long as it has the same outcome for US
expansionism.
At the time of Nuri Said's
downfall, and again during the Vietnam War, the American
leadership attributed its troubles to the cleverness of
the Soviet Union, mostly because it was the Cold War,
and Washington had no other way of explaining, let alone
accepting, outbreaks of nationalism, localism and the
like.
President Vladimir Putin, his Defense
Minister Sergei Ivanov and new Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov understand how easy it would be for Bush and his
circle to revive similar charges, and put the blame for
their own mistakes and battlefield losses on the
Kremlin. They understand, too, how different the war in
Iraq is from the war in Vietnam. They realize that the
American people have even less commitment to the
imperial fight this time than they had before. The
Russian policymakers understand that it is Israel, and
its men in Washington, who are mostly calling the shots
for the president. The Russian assessment, and American
public opinion, are therefore likely to converge, as the
Arabs begin to exact the same toll on Americans in Iraq,
as the Palestinians have been doing to the Israelis in
that occupied territory.
Israel is trying to
shoot its way out of a casualty ratio of one of their
own to three Palestinians. For the time being, the US is
trying to cope with a ratio of one to 50. Israel's
effective capture of the White House has taken a
half-century to pull off, and for those, like Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon advisor
Richard Perle, who now command the heights of US power,
this is a do-or-die campaign. Only it will be patriotic
Americans who will be doing the dying. And they are not
as malleable as their president.
Russian policy
is therefore founded on letting the battlefield serve as
a reminder of Nuri Said's warning. Officially, Moscow
would like to effect a substitution of US troops for a
combination of Iraqi sovereignty and United Nations
support. But sovereignty cannot be rigged by Wolfowitz
and Perle, nor paid for by the US Congress and
Halliburton Corporation. Nor can Bush's puppets in
England, Australia, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and Japan
pretend to UN legitimacy. The Iraqi resistance is making
sure that point is already clear (ask Spain). Sooner or
later, the allied occupation forces will have to be
replaced. But creating a new Iraqi political consensus
will take much longer than Bush has realized.
Until that happens, Russian policy is to try to
neutralize the damage that the Israeli faction in
Washington can do, and try to advance a strategic
relationship with the Americans who may be able to wrest
power over Bush from the grip of the Israelis. Two
remarks by Ivanov on his recent visit to Washington
indicate this direction. The Kremlin, said Ivanov,
"considered joint Russian-US efforts within the
framework of the counterterrorism coalition to be much
more important than our differences about the war in
Iraq ... " The US alliance, he added, regarding the
Balkan conflict in Kosovo, but a general principle
nonetheless, "must finally understand that one cannot
flirt with political extremists".
For Russia, it
is crucial to prevent the deteriorating US position in
Iraq from becoming the policy of perpetual war and
territorial aggrandizement, which has characterized the
Israeli policy for decades. To this end, having such a
person as Bush in the White House may be preferable, if
the extremists around Bush can be defeated by the simple
facts on the battlefield.
Ivanov and other
Russian officials have acknowledged recently that if the
Americans were to decide to abandon their redoubts in
Iraq, as they did in Vietnam, the communal instability
inside the country would pose severe risks of spreading.
And that isn't in the Russian interest, so long as
Islamic fundamentalism already threatens across several
Russian frontiers, and inside the Russian Caucasus.
Ivanov made clear also that, beyond the Chechen
conflict, Russia is especially concerned to protect the
movement of its exports, especially energy, to market
through waterways and pipelines that are vulnerable to
attack.
Ivanov told his Washington audience that
he expects that the most likely conflicts between the
Great Powers that may "flare up in the foreseeable
future will certainly be related to the economic domain,
to the needs to secure by the individual, national
states of their national interests, especially in the
sphere of economy". Teaching Washington to accept that
Russian economic interests are not antithetical to
American ones may take time. But as long as the US keeps
making costly mistakes in Iraq, time is on Russia's
side. And so is the price of crude oil.
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men with short memories who won't have heard of
Nuri Pasha, and aren't in the frame of mind to listen to
his advice. 
