In an
unexpected but surely welcome boost for US President
George W Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin on
Friday announced that Russian intelligence had received
information that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
had planned terrorist attacks again the US.
But
Russian media reports were decidedly skeptical about the
veracity and spontaneity of Putin's remarks, noting that
almost as soon as the preliminary report of the US
commission investigating the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks was made public, an anonymous "Russian
intelligence source" told Interfax that "as early as
early 2002 Russian intelligence learned that the Iraqi
special services were planning terrorist attacks on the
United States and on US diplomatic and military
facilities abroad".
Kommersant-Daily reported on
Monday that the Interfax report was issued even before
the final commission session had been closed. The
statement came just as Bush was facing harsh criticism
for launching a military operation against Saddam that
was justified in large part by administration claims
that he posed a terrorist threat to the US. Journalists
and analysts quickly began describing Putin's statement
as open support for Bush.
Kommersant-Daily and
Vremya novostei both speculated that this low-level
support failed to produce sufficient resonance in the
West. Therefore, the newspapers wrote, the Kremlin
staged a scene at a press conference in Astana,
Kazakhstan, arranging to have a reporter ask Putin a
completely off-the-wall question about the US
commission's report. This gave Putin the opportunity to
repeat - almost word for word - the statement from the
anonymous intelligence source that Interfax had reported
the previous day.
"Yes, after the events of
September 11, 2001 and before the beginning of the
military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services
repeatedly received information that official organs of
the Hussein regime were preparing terrorist attacks on
the territory of the United States and on military and
civilian targets outside its borders," Putin said. "This
information really was transmitted through cooperative
channels to our American colleagues."
Although
Putin was quick to add that Russia's position opposing
the military operation in Iraq had not changed, his
remarks clearly marked a shift toward the Bush
administration's positions. "Does this mean that there
is reason to argue that the United States acted in
self-defense?" Putin asked. "I don't know. That is a
separate topic."
Moscow "is looking
pragmatically at the future - at the presidential
elections in the United States. It seems that the
Kremlin has made up its mind and is backing Bush,"
Vremya Novostei wrote. A sampling of leading Russian
analysts published by politcom.ru on June 15 found that
most of them felt that Bush would win the November 4
election and that Iraq would be the most important
issue.
But there was considerable skepticism
about the veracity of Putin's declaration. The press
argued that if the US administration had had such
information in the run-up to the military operation, it
would have used it to convince the United Nations
Security Council to adopt a resolution authorizing the
action. Media reports noted that neither Bush nor Vice
President Dick Cheney mentioned the Russian reports
during their testimony before the September 11
commission. Analyst Boris Vinogradov, writing in Novye
Izvestiya on Monday, noted that Putin's statement put
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President
Jacques Chirac - both of whom have heretofore enjoyed
close personal relations with Putin - in an "idiotic
position", because Putin implied that Russia did not
share this intelligence with its "allies" in the antiwar
coalition.
These doubts and others reinforced
the impression that the statement was clearly intended
as political support for Bush. And although there was no
shortage of theories about what might be motivating
Putin to make such a transparent gesture now, none of
them seemed entirely convincing.
Kommersant-Daily noted that the Kremlin
traditionally "finds it much more convenient" to deal
with Republican US administrations than Democratic ones,
which "tend to harp too much on human rights". Bush, it
noted, did not listen to a group of US congressmen who
recently called on the administration to exclude Russia
from the Group of Eight (G8) leading industrialized
countries. One of the analysts surveyed earlier by
politcom.ru, Strategic Studies Center director Andrei
Piontokovskii, noted in his assessment of the US
election that Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry
has been rumored to be considering asking Republican
Senator John McCain to be his vice presidential
candidate and that McCain was one of the sponsors of the
movement to exclude Russia from the G8.
Putin's
comments about Saddam lent added significance to his
many statements in support of Bush at the G8 summit in
the US earlier this month. At that time, Putin
congratulated Bush for the turnaround of the US economy
and said that the Democrats "don't have the moral right
to attack George Bush for Iraq since they themselves did
the same thing [in Yugoslavia]".
Kommersant-Daily also attached significance to
the fact that Putin made his statement while meeting
with Central Asian leaders. Part of Putin's message, the
daily commented, was to demonstrate that Russia is an
equal partner with the US in the struggle against
international terrorism and "to show who is the most
important in the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent
States]".
Meanwhile, Nezavisimaya Gazeta on
Tuesday speculated that Putin might be giving Bush a
hand regarding "Saddam's terror" in order "to get
Washington's support against 'Chechen terror'." It added
as well that Putin's support might enable him to bargain
for "a special role" in post-Saddam Iraq. The daily
connected Putin's statement and his purported desire for
Western understanding regarding Chechnya with a June 20
report in the Italian daily La Repubblica that some 300
Chechen fighters have appeared in Iraq to support Iraqi
insurgents.
Finally, Kremlin-connected political
consultant Stanislav Belkovskii told APN the day of
Putin's Astana comments that the Kremlin wanted the US
to pressure Qatar to release the two Russian
secret-service agents currently on trial there for the
February assassination of former acting Chechen
president Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. "It is possible that
Vladimir Putin's support of US President George Bush was
a condition for the Americans help in return in solving
the 'Qatar problem'," Belkovskii said.
Although
analysts were at a loss to come up with a definitive
explanation of Putin's comments, they were unanimous in
viewing it as an extraordinary and potentially momentous
step, possibly as important as Putin's fabled telephone
call to Bush immediately following the September 11
attacks. In the months after those attacks, Bush
repeatedly reminded the world that Putin was the first
global leader to express his solidarity with the United
States, and those months marked the high point of
US-Russian relations since Bush became president.
Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted
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