A lot of horse-trading went on in the talks between Vladimir Putin and George Bush when they met at Camp David last weekend. If you scratch my back, the Russian president effectively convinced his American counterpart, I’ll scratch yours — to our mutual benefit.
The US administration has for all intents and purposes given up on multilateral relations, opting instead for a set of bilateral arrangements, with countries bargaining directly with Washington, expecting, as a quid pro quo, to go along with their policies, even where those policies, as in the case of Russia’s reprehensible campaign to stomp on Chechnya’s struggle for independence, violate international standards.
The Russians think they can scratch Washington’s back — and then some. Though not going wholly with Bush’s demands for money and troops in Iraq, they nevertheless have presented themselves as America’s partners in “curbing the nuclear ambitions of Iran.” Moreover, after its recovery from the financial meltdown in 1998, Russia considers itself today to be an “energy giant,” a credible alternative to the Middle East as a reliable oil supplier. Above all, to sweeten the pot, and to gladden the hearts of the American president and the neoconservatives in his administration, the Russians are confident about their value as Washington’s ardent backers in the war on terrorism.
Russia and the United States have now found so much common ground on the issue that not only does Russia advance, and President Bush accept, the notion that Moscow is waging a “legitimate struggle against terrorism in Chechnya,” but the US government has now designated Chechen leader Shamil Basayev “a threat to American interests.” In other words, the savageries that Russia’s military forces are committing in that sad Muslim republic are now seen on a par with what the United States’ own war against Al- Qaeda. Yet consider how it was none other than candidate Bush, in the 2000 presidential campaign, who called for cutting financial assistance to Russia for its brutalities in Chechnya.
Putin, keep in mind, is no less a hypocrite in this regard: On the one hand, he says he is skeptical of US plans for Iraq’s political and constitutional reconstruction — insisting that the UN and the Arab states play a role — and on the other he calls for the permanent presence of Russian troops in Chechnya, the writing of the Chechen people’s constitution in Moscow, and the selection of a presidential candidate by the Kremlin, one Ahmad Kadyrov, with the mandate to force out of the race other candidates.
To be sure, some American officials, most notably at the State Department, have warned Congress about Russia’s excesses. Steven Pifer, one such official, told a congressional commission, on the eve of the Putin-Bush summit, that the phony elections in Chechnya “lacked credibility” and could set back rather than advance a political settlement of the conflict — a conflict that Putin launched four years ago, that he has repeatedly declared to be over, while thousands of his troops continue to be killed in it.
But Putin, a former KGB agent and a true Stalinist in his approach to dealing with minorities, had hoped that, at Camp David, President Bush, in his eagerness to win Moscow’s cooperation on Iraq, Iran and Korea, would turn a blind eye to the issue, and accept as valid the comparison between the war in Chechnya and US operations in Iraq. Bush obliged him.
The comparison, editorialized the Washington Post last Friday, is no less than obscene. “In Chechnya,” said the editorial, “Russian troops have wiped out a democratically elected government, killed tens of thousands of civilians, forced others out of refugee camps and back into the war zone, reduced the capital and every major town to rubble (and) indiscriminately rounded up the entire male populations of dozens of villages for torture or summary execution.”
Still, Bush went along with Putin on the question of Chechnya: By all means, do there what you must, but in return support us in our unilateral posture around the world.
In polite diplomatic circles, that’s known as realpolitik. In newspaper columns, we call that horse-trading — in this case, off the back of a little, pauperized people in a distant, hardly noticed Muslim republic in the Caucasus.
— Arab News Opinion 2 October 2003
