Recent headlines make it clear that relations between the U.S. and Russia are decidedly frosty...particularly in the wake of US proposals to install an anti-missile system in eastern Europe on the federation's doorstep, ostensibly to guard against launches from Iran.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary William Gates went to Moscow this past week to meet with Federation President Vladimir Putin and Mr. Putin wasted no time telling them both, in plain words and in public, what he thought about the idea. That such remarks would be made in public (and after Putin kept the two waiting for 40 minutes) were hardly designed to create the atmosphere of friendship which their boss, the decider and, it turns out, the history major, felt was inevitable when he and Putin first met over six years ago.
It is worth going back to the first meetings between the two in 2001 to see just how childlessly clueless our noble leader was about Russia, its history and its leadership. Far from ending...the Cold War seems to be resuming in a climate very similar to the one which supposedly ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And as this all unfolds, the strange truth is that mr. bush and mr. putin are in fact....truly soul mates.
June 16, 2001 – Official White House transcript of Slovenia Press Conference following meetings between george bush and Russian Federation President Vadimir Putiin:
Q: Did President Putin ease your concern at all about the spread of nuclear technologies by Russia, and is this a man that Americans can trust?
bush: I will answer the question. I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue.
There was no kind of diplomatic chit-chat, trying to throw each other off balance. There was a straightforward dialogue. And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship. I wouldn't have invited him to my ranch if I didn't trust him. (Laughter.)
Secondly, I appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk about a new relationship, and we will continue these dialogues. The basis for my discussion began with this simple premise: that Russia and the United States must establish a new relationship beyond that of the old Cold War mentality. The Cold War said loud and clear that we're opponents and that we bring the peace through ability for each of us to destroy each other.
Friends don't destroy each other. People who cooperate do not have a basis of peace on destruction. Our nations are confronted with new threats in the 21st century. Terror in the hands of what we call rogue nations is a threat. I expressed my concern, and so did the President, very openly, about nations on his border and nations that can't stand America's freedoms developing the capacity to hold each of us hostage. And he agreed.
I brought up concerns about Iran. And I'm hesitant to put words in the President's mouth, but he said he's concerned, as well -- I think that accurately categorizes your position -- and we'll work together to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. And I believe as we go down the road that we'll be able to develop a constructive relationship as to how to use our technologies and research and willingness to keep the peace, in a way that makes the world more peaceful.
I was so pleased that we were able to begin constructive, real dialogue between our Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Mr. Andrei Ivanov. These will be fruitful discussions, and I believe what people will see is a strategy, a joint strategy. The President's a history major, and so am I. And we remember the old history. It's time to write new history, in a positive and constructive way.
So....the "decider" has looked into Mr. Putin's soul and has based his judgments and his foreign policy on that careful analysis...the kind of "gut feeling" that has enabled him to choose sound thinkers like dick cheney, michael brown, michael chertoff, douglas feith, donald rumsfeld, alberto gonzales, and many more to help him carry out his "policies." Just how are things going today?
NY Times – Oct. 12th, 2007
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sharply upbraided the visiting American secretaries of state and defense on Friday as highly anticipated negotiations produced no specific accords to resolve growing disagreements over missile defense and other security issues.
Mr. Putin followed a pattern of recent criticisms of American policy, whether speaking in Moscow, Munich or even Maine, and he shaped the initial public tone on Friday when he greeted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at his residence outside Moscow with a derisive lecture in front of the television cameras.
Although the sides agreed that their ministers of foreign affairs and defense would meet again in six months, the talks did little to dispel Russian concerns over American intentions on missile defense, or to persuade the Kremlin to cancel its threat to suspend compliance with a treaty covering the array of conventional forces in Europe.
Mr. Putin often veers from the diplomatic language typical of such high-level meetings. On Friday, meeting with the Americans at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside of Moscow, the outwardly warm interactions that once marked relations, at least between the countries’ two leaders, had clearly chilled in public.
Mr. Putin seemed to catch Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice off guard with his remarks, since no public statements were planned in advance.
Mr. Putin, though, arrived with notes and spent eight minutes welcoming the opportunity to talk about where Russia strongly disagreed with the Bush administration. His remarks seemed to anger Ms. Rice, though Mr. Gates reacted impassively.
Mr. Putin kept the Americans waiting 40 minutes before he appeared.
And of course, mr. bush clearly felt that his "soul buddy" would be the catalyst for a new blossoming of democracy in Russia:
NY Times October 14th, 2007
With Tight Grip on the Ballot, Putin is Forcing Foes Out:
Nearly eight years after Mr. Putin took office and began tightening his control over all aspects of the Russian government, he will almost certainly with this election succeed in extinguishing the last embers of opposition in Parliament. Strict new election rules adopted under Mr. Putin, combined with the Kremlin’s dominance over the news media and government agencies, are expected to propel the party that he created, United Russia, to a parliamentary majority even more overwhelming than its current one.
The system is so arrayed against all other parties that even some Putin allies have acknowledged that it harks back to the politics of the old days. Sergei M. Mironov, a staunch Putin supporter and the chairman of the upper house of Parliament, suggested recently that United Russia seemed to have been modeled on a certain forerunner. “I think that the television broadcasts from the United Russia convention reminded a lot of people of long-forgotten pictures from the era of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” said Mr. Mironov, leader of another pro-Putin party, Just Russia.
Mr. Putin’s second presidential term expires next year, and under the Russian Constitution, he cannot run for a third consecutive term. At the lavishly choreographed convention of United Russia this month, he indicated that he would transfer his power base to the party and Parliament and could become prime minister next year. The announcement raised the stakes for the December election.
The president currently appoints and wields far more power than the prime minister, but that could change should Mr. Putin become prime minister. Some analysts are speculating that Mr. Putin may try to create a parliamentary system with a strong prime minister and the president as a largely ceremonial post, akin to the arrangement in countries like Italy or Israel.
The Russian Federation under Putin represents real challenges to what is left of the free world and the threat is , strangely enough, not so much military as it is the threat of a state-empowered and possibly run Mafia, with vast powers and vast resources because of its quasi-governmental links in a country where a strong, and powerful central government apparatus controls all levels of media, police power and business investment.
Putin has already demonstrated that he will use the powers of government to eliminate opponents and those who have amassed personal wealth or powers - overpowering and subsuming the nation's oil and gas industry for example. Doing so has given the government, with its central powers, direct access to vast amounts of unreported, uncontrolled and unprincipled wealth.
The presence of a Russian Mafia and its global growth are well documented. It has spread through eastern Europe to the power centers of Europe, big cities of the U.S. and elsewhere, running additional operations which generate huge sums of unregulated cash....arms sales, prostitution, pornography, diamonds and more.
Free Internet Press - Oct. 13, 2007
An Internet business based in St. Petersburg, Russia, has become a world hub for Web sites devoted to child pornography, spamming and identity theft, according to computer security experts. They say Russian authorities have provided little help in efforts to shut down the company.
The Russian Business Network sells Web site hosting to people engaged in criminal activity, say the security experts.
Groups operating through the company's computers are thought to be responsible for about half of last year's incidents of "phishing" - I.D.-theft scams in which cybercrooks use e-mail to lure people into entering personal and financial data at fake commerce and banking sites.
One group of phishers, known as the Rock Group, used the company's network to steal about $150 million from bank accounts last year, according to a report by VeriSign of Mountain View, California, one of the world's largest Internet security firms.
Putin's own roots are with the KGB and experts on Russia indicate his rise to power as the head of the Russian Federation was made possible in no small measure by his knowledge of and use of the levers of power which still exist within the country's intelligence, police and military forces. Those powers have helped him eliminate enemies and opponents to his power, reward friends and cement his position.
In a country with that kind of power and control, it seems highly unlikely that "The Russian Business Network" and related organizations can operate without the approval, support and very likely the payoffs needed to stay in power....payoffs to those in power and funds which can then be used to expand the global network of crime, spying and power being created by Putin and his henchmen.
Such powers are much more difficult to combat than traditional military conflicts. They operate in secret, they are well financed, and they are ruthless in eliminating their opposition (as is seen in the frequent assassinations of those Russian journalists brave or foolhardy enough to try and probe into their actions and the links to the government and the brutal takeovers of private companies by the government.)
What is more, as noted in the above article, they use their powers to protect organizations like the RBN from international agencies seeking to control them and/or put them out of business. And finally, they provide services and networks and funding to very bad people....terrorist networks, international crime groups and even, in some cases, so called legitimate governments.
They are the vanguard of a new kind of international threat to the freedom and democracy which America claims to champion. They rise to power, in part, because the leader of America, has been able to read their soul.....and discovered that they are truly ....blood brothers. Who better to make the point, clearly without any realization of what she was actually saying, than ms. Rice in remarks to the press after meeting with Russian dissidents:
The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.
"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.
"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.
You need only change Duma to Congress in that sentence to chart our own steady progress towards a new Gulag ourselves. We have all the elements....rendition, wiretapping, the use of torture, imprisonment without charge, lack of habeas corpus, bank surveillance, retribution against opponents using the powers of the government, stacking of the judiciary system, no-bid contracts awarded to political supporters, using the powers of government to protect those supporters from legal action......
We are all part of the new Russian brotherhood.....and complicit in its creation.