Do not be
surprised to see three or four divisions of the Russian
army in the Sunni triangle before year-end, with an
announcement just prior to the US presidential
election in November. Long rumored (or under
negotiation), a Russian deployment of 40,000 soldiers
was predicted on July 16 by the US intelligence
site
www.stratfor.com, and
denied by the Russian Foreign Ministry on July 20.
Nonetheless, the logic is compelling. Russian support
for US occupation forces would make scorched earth
of Senator John Kerry's attack on the Bush
administration's foreign policy, namely its failure to
form effective alliances. For Russian President Vladimir
Putin, the chance to make scorched earth of Fallujah is
even more tempting.
In
exchange for a troop presence in Iraq, Russia would
obtain a free hand in dealings with the countries of the
former Soviet Union. It would gain leverage against a
weakening Turkey in the Caucasus and Central Asia. And
it would vastly enhance its leverage in negotiations
over the placement of oil pipelines. Most important,
perhaps, it would assert its old status as a global
military power against the feckless Europeans. In short,
the arrangement would benefit everyone, except of course
the population of Fallujah.
America's squeamishness in the face of
large-scale civilian casualties mystifies the Russians,
who know about such things. The remnants of the
Chechen resistance have few friends, even among Arab
governments. The General Assembly of the United Nations
remained mute over the Chechen dead when Russia razed
Grozny in 1999, killing or displacing about half of the
population of 1 million. The Council of Europe,
responsible for investigating human rights violations,
suspended activity in Chechnya last year by agreement
with Moscow. In January, the Saudis received the
pro-Russian president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, who
told alJazeera, "I think the most important factor is
that Prince Abd Allah invited the leaders of the Chechen
Republic. This is a definite recognition of the current
authorities [being] friendly to Moscow."
Israel's apologists claim that world silence
about Chechnya betrays the hypocrisy of a world
community that marshals the General Assembly against the
minor inconvenience of its defensive wall, but bites its
tongue before the mass destruction of Muslim life.
Islam, however, does not count lives the same way. More
important than life itself is the integrity of Islam's
promise. A re-established Jewish state with Jerusalem as
its capital on territory won from the former Dar
al-Islam subverts Islam's promise, namely that it will
supercede the false teachings of Christian and Jew. That
is a humiliation that transcends the Muslim pain
threshold, a dishonor too great to bear (see Horror and humiliation in
Fallujah, April 27). By contrast, no Muslim
expects an Islamic state to stand up to a power like
Russia, even in its senescence.
President
George W Bush has mis-defined the mission of US forces to
the point that a deus ex machina (god from
the machine) offers the best way out. "We did not come
here to fight these people, we came here to free them,"
the commander of the 1st Marine Division told his
men after withdrawing from Fallujah in May, the New
York Times reported May 11. If the marines do not fight
them, however, somebody will have to. In a recent series,
Asia Times Online correspondent Nir Rosen reported on
the surge in Islamist morale attendant on the US
retreat. There are only two ways to reduce irregular
forces that use the local civilian population as a
shield. With sufficiently precise intelligence, the
Israelis have shown, it is possible to kill off a
sufficient number of leadership cadres to render the
opposition ineffective. Poor intelligence capacity
eliminates that option in Iraq (Why America is losing the intelligence
war, November 11, 2003). The other option is to
pursue the enemy regardless of the cost in civilian
lives. Never have American ground forces done this. It
is one thing to annihilate Tokyo or Dresden from the
air, and another to direct artillery fire at civilian
neighborhoods, as did the Russians in Grozny. For
Americans, the horror of such encounters is
overwhelming.
Deploying proxy forces who
lack this kind of compunction is the obvious
solution. Earlier I guessed (wrongly) that Washington would
avail itself of the 75,000-strong Kurdish militias
- peshmergas - to subdue the Sunni triangle. Turning
the matter over to the Russians would be a masterstroke.
If the United States takes Russia on as a partner in Iraq, as
I predict, a profound change will ensue in US policy
toward the Muslim world. Both the Bill Clinton and Bush
administrations staked a great deal on support for
Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, by way of showing that the
US was willing to bomb Christians in order to protect
Muslims. In Russia's view, the US deliberately provoked
war with Serbia. Clinton's special ambassador Richard
Holbrooke, a likely secretary of state in a John Kerry
administration, delivered an ultimatum to former Serbian
president Slobodan Milosevic at the February 1999
Rambouillet negotiations, with the intent of provoking
war, in the universally held Slavic view.
The bombardment of Serbia, Washington hoped,
would establish its bona fides among Muslims.
"The terrorists we confront cannot deceive us by
attempting to wrap themselves in Islam's glorious
mantle. Islam's great leaders and scholars tell us
otherwise. Our own history and experience tell us
otherwise. We helped defend Muslims in Kuwait. We helped
defend Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo," US Ambassador John
Negroponte told the United Nations General Assembly on
October 1, 2001. Serbia was a cheap sacrifice. Except
for Ivo Andric, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1961, no Serbian has won the attention of world
culture in half a century. Andric's derogatory portrayal
of Bosnian Muslims (written when Bosnia contributed a
division to Germany's Waffen SS) proscribes him from
polite company today. Devastated during both world wars
and kept backward by communism, Serbia had no friends in
the West, apart from a tiny emigre community, and poor
capacity to tell its side of the story.
Whether one accepts the Slavic view of events or not,
the Muslim world turned up its nose at the
Clinton administration's attempt to buy its goodwill. The United
States threatens the integrity of the Islamic world not by its
policy, but by its nature; the creative
destruction and cultural amnesia that define US society threaten
to tear apart the sinews of traditional Islamic life.
Along with Holbrooke and former secretary of
state Madeleine Albright, Clinton's national security
adviser Samuel R Berger crafted this gambit gone awry.
Berger's present embarrassment about documents he allegedly
stole from the National Archives may have nothing to do
with the prospective Russian-US arrangement, but it
may set the events of 1999 in a different
context. Allegations already are circulating in the media
that the Clinton administration arranged
for Afghanistan-based jihadis to travel to Kosovo in
the service of the Albanian cause. One should not take
such rumors at face value, but they do suggest that
the Clinton administration's accommodative stance
toward the Muslim world may be subject to a nasty sort
of dissection during the US presidential
election.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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policies.)
www.stratfor.com, and
denied by the Russian Foreign Ministry on July 20.
Nonetheless, the logic is compelling. Russian support
for US occupation forces would make scorched earth
of Senator John Kerry's attack on the Bush
administration's foreign policy, namely its failure to
form effective alliances. For Russian President Vladimir
Putin, the chance to make scorched earth of Fallujah is
even more tempting. 
