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COMMENTARY
Russian weapons and foreign
rogues
By Stephen Blank
At
the highest level, the Bush administration has protested to President Vladimir
Putin about Russian arms sales to Iraq. American reports indicate that Russian
firms have sold Iraq night-vision goggles, anti-tank guided missiles and
jamming devices to counter the US's global positioning system (GPS). Any such
sales would constitute a violation of the United Nations sanctions regime on
Iraq, and also raise several disturbing points, many of which, unfortunately
are not new.
First, reports of Russian proliferation to Iraq are hardly new, nor are
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In 2000 it was reported that
Iraq apparently had obtained from Russian sources
a weapon that jams the global positioning system
(GPS) of US missiles and satellites, rendering
them useless.
Russia:
Proliferation personified (Jan 8,
'03)
Asia Times
Online
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they isolated ones. We know that Russia was selling prohibited technologies for
both conventional and nuclear weapons to Iraq in the 1990s. Second, as former
UN arms inspector Richard Butler has written, then-prime minister Yevgeny
Primakov was instrumental in helping Iraq to stonewall the inspections regime.
British and American intelligence agencies have even accused Primakov in public
of being on Saddam Hussein's payroll, unprecedented public statements from
normally highly reclusive organizations. Nor did this proliferation stop with
Primakov.
Russian newspapers have repeatedly reported that Russia's government and arms
dealers have established linkages with arms dealers and plants in former Soviet
republics like Belarus to sell arms to states like Iraq that could not have
been publicly sold by Moscow. Under Putin, Moscow has pursued a systematic
policy to tie defense industries in the former Soviet republics to those in
Moscow and restore the structure of the old unified Soviet system. One benefit
of this policy is Moscow's enhanced ability to hide behind third parties in
these kinds of arms sales. Thus proliferation to Iraq is not an isolated case
of arms sales gone wild, but rather part of a broader policy that also
encompasses Central and Eastern Europe.
For example, virtually every Central and East European government has reported
that Russian attempts to subvert East European governments through economic
penetration, corruption of politicians, intelligence penetration, etc have
continued at least since 1997, if not earlier. Evidence from the Czech
Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Baltic states is
overwhelming and points to a strategic policy decision in Moscow. These
linkages that occur through Russia's embassies abroad are also connected to
shadowy ties to illegal arms dealers. We have seen that scandals involving arms
deals in Ukraine, Serbia and Bulgaria, to cite only some cases, are connected
with the provision of arms to rogue states.
Thus Russia, for all its protestations of innocence, as in the case of its
continuing nuclear proliferation to Iran and rumors of collaboration with North
Korea, shows no interest in upholding the UN's sanctions regime. Clearly as
well it shows little actual concern about the threats posed by the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction worldwide.
Here again it is not alone. China has sold fiber-optic materials to Iraq in
violation of the sanctions and has been a major proliferator to Iran, and
evidently North Korea as well. Similarly, French arms sales to Iraq or
facilitation of third-party arms sales have been described in the New York
Times and Washington Times by William Safire and Bill Gertz, respectively.
These arms sales cast a lurid light on their rhetoric for opposing the war and
for invoking the authority of the UN even as they violate its provisions.
The motives for these sales clearly go beyond the acquisition of money. Russian
analysts, for example, regularly announce that arms sales are so tightly
controlled by the state that rogue salesmen are no longer a question. Likewise,
there is a very strong connection between the arms sales establishment and the
government, including the foreign intelligence service (SVR) in Russia, to the
point where the arms sales organizations have always been seen as a major
source for raising untraceable election funds for Russian politicians. This
same connection between arms dealers abroad and Russian intelligence is amply
attested to as well in foreign reports. It also is just as unlikely that the
Chinese and French arms salesmen are freelancing.
One can only conclude that despite all the protest about the need to uphold the
UN and international law, or the anti-terrorist coalition, the temptation to
strike surreptitiously at American interests abroad remains too strong for the
Russian and other establishments to forego. Unfortunately for these arms
dealers this is not an administration that is prepared to forgive and forget.
Although some figures of the Russian establishment are either getting rich or
staying in business, or gratifying their anti-American reflexes, the gains that
they make are inevitably short-term ones. But the costs that they are incurring
and which undoubtedly will be exacted by Washington are going to be lasting
ones.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of international security affairs residing in
Harrisburg, PA.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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