Vladimir Putin’s Foreign-Policy Objectives, & His
Desire for U.S. to Be an AllyBy Eric
Zuesse
September 15, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "SCF"
- On
September 4th, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin restated, as he has
many times before, that he seeks a U.S.- Russian alliance to
overcome the global Islamic jihad movement, in Syria, Iraq, and
everywhere.
Then, on Tuesday September 8th, Yahoo News
bannered, “Austria
joins growing voices that say Assad must be part of Syrian
solution,” and reported that Austria’s Foreign Minister
Sebastian Kurz said: “In my opinion the priority is the fight
against terror. This will not be possible without powers such as
Russia and Iran.” German Economic News noted then
that, “Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo had
already called on Monday for negotiations with Assad to end the
war.”
However, the U.S. government is strongly opposed
to accepting Putin’s offer of an alliance to overcome Islamic jihad.
Putin’s foreign-policy objectives are consistent;
and his latest turn fits with all that has preceded, which has been
his single-minded focus, ever since he first became Russia’s leader
in 2000: to defeat the global threat of Islamic jihad, which has
been the chief military concern for Russia itself, ever since the
First Chechen War, during 1994-96, radicalized the predominantly
Sunni (Saudi-based) Muslim Chechen Republic, to separate themselves
from the predominantly Orthodox Catholic Russia. By the time of
Putin’s contest for the Presidency in 2000, Putin’s hard line
against religious separatism became a leading factor in his
electoral victory.
On 11 February 2004, this is how the pro-Western Moscow
Times, which wikipedia refers to as “the
first Western daily to be published in Russia,” described “Putin
and the Chechen War: Together Forever”:
In the summer of 1999, the ruling elite
was at a loss. Boris Yeltsin was clearly not up to running the
country, but no suitable successor could be found. The obvious
candidates — Sergei Stepashin, Nikolai Bordyuzha and Sergei
Kiriyenko — weren’t presidential material. But then Chechen
separatists staged a raid into neighboring Dagestan. Putin
directed the operation that drove the fighters from Dagestan,
and after two apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow [which
some accounts say was secretly planned by Putin himself],
Putin launched an “anti-terrorist operation” in Chechnya.
Suddenly Putin was the No. 1 politician in the country. …
The Chechen fighters were operating on the
assumption that the Kremlin would not tolerate substantial
losses on the eve of the election. This is why Chechen
detachments flouted military logic and remained in Grozny after
it was surrounded, continuing to offer fierce resistance.
Putin’s campaign managers also assumed
that heavy Russian losses would hurt his chances at the polls.
As the fighting in Grozny took its toll, they feared that by
election day in June 2000 Putin’s support would have evaporated.
This concern probably explains Yeltsin’s decision to step down
early, bringing the election forward by several months.
As we now know, those fears were
groundless. Heavy Russian losses had no impact on Putin’s poll
numbers. The four years of Putin’s first term, during which the
war raged on unabated, have made clear that Russian voters are
prepared to endure endless lies from their leaders about the
latest “phase” of the “operation” in Chechnya, as well as a
staggering number of Russian dead.
[Alexander Golts] doubt
that any Russian politician today would have the nerve to remind
Putin of the promises he made back in 2000. He vowed “to crush
the terrorist scum’.
However, Simon Shuster, who likewise is
anti-Putin, had this to
say about Chechnya, in the cover story of TIME, eleven
years later, on 22 June 2015:
Chechnya has undergone a striking
transformation. Its cities have been rebuilt with money from Moscow.
All traces of its separatist rebellion have been suppressed. And
most importantly, a new generation has been raised to respect—at
times even to worship—the Russian leader and his local proxies. With
no clear memories of the wars for independence, the young people of
Chechnya are now the best guarantee that Russia’s hold over the
region will persist.
Putin might not have “crushed the terrorist scum,”
but he has held it at bay for long enough a time to reestablish
relative peace in Chechnya, along with a previously unparallelled
degree of prosperity.
The International Crisis Group, a pro-Western and
anti-Russian NGO, and an affiliate
of NATO’s Atlantic Council, vigorously criticizes the
authoritarianism and cult of personality that Putin has imposed in
Chechnya, even while reluctantly
acknowledging that:
The number of Chechens in the insurgency
has been steadily decreasing. With their centuries-long record
of being ready to die for their independence, Chechens do not
seem very susceptible to the suicidal ideology of a global
jihad. Many who are have joined the conflict in Syria, which has
significantly drained the human resources of the North Caucasus
insurgency overall, but especially in Chechnya. A Chechen
interior ministry source estimated in 2013 that 200-500 Chechens
were fighting in Syria.
The Islamic jihadists are more comfortable in, and
more accepted by the residents of, the anti-Assad, pro-Sunni, areas
of Syria, doing war against Shiia Muslims, and against the
Russian-supported secular Shiia President Assad, than they are back
home in their native land (Chechnya in Russia). Even Putin’s enemies
acknowledge Putin’s successes against the Saudi-based
Sunni international Islamic jihad movement. Putin has become an
experienced specialist in the war against Islamic terrorism.
Whereas the United States simply spreads Islamic
jihad, even while bombing jihadists and creating more martyrs for
“the cause” of jihad, Russia has found ways instead to push back
effectively against the Saudi-originated
movement of Islamic jihad, and to develop, during decades, a
peaceful regional diversity, which can encompass even areas where
(as in Chechnya) Islamic or sharia law is imposed, and do this even
within a predominantly Christian-majority nation (such as Russia,
but this also describes the United States).
The U.S. never had to deal with the challenge that
Russia has, of containing within itself a majority-Muslim state, and
especially not containing a state whose majority are Sunni Muslim,
the variant of Islam that (unlike Shiia Islam) produces
jihadists, people with suicide-belts etc., who seek to impose a
global Caliphate, a worldwide regime that imposes strict Islamic
law.
The ICG report on Chechnya criticizes today’s
Chechnya, by saying that, “Much of the population lives off pensions
and welfare payments,” and that corruption and clan-rule are the
norm, but all that’s really new in this is actually the peace, and
the pensions: corruption and clan-rule have been the rule in
Chechnya for centuries, at the very least.
Simon Shuster’s video
at TIME, about today’s Chechnya, opens:
The kids growing up in Chechnya these days
are a lot luckier than their parents and their grandparents. At
least the youngest ones have only known their homeland to be a
peaceful and even quite beautiful place, full of enormous
mosques, and skyscrapers, and shopping districts, and fast-food
joints.
Shuster then refers to the civil war, but he says,
“Today, Chechnya is a very different place,” and he acknowledges
that the adults there, who remember the wars, are much happier now,
that the jihadists are gone, or dead.
Al Jazeera television, which is controlled by
gas-rich Qatar’s anti-Russian Sunni royal family, the Thanis, has criticized Putin
for his placing in control of Chechnya the anti-jihadist Chechen
Muslim, Ramzan Kadyrov. Thanis are also
the chief financial backers for the Muslim Brotherhood, and,
along with the Saud family (the
main financial backers of Al Qaeda), are also among the main
financial backers of the Syrian warriors who are fighting to replace
the secular Shiite leader, Assad, by a sectarian Sunni Islamic
regime in Syria.
The anti-Russian American newspaper, New York
Times, headlined on 1 July 2004,“Qatar
Court Convicts 2 Russians in Top Chechen’s Death,” and reported:
The trial has provided an international stage
for both sides to air their grievances about Russia’s war in
Chechnya and debate the question of whether the fight against
terrorism justified such extreme measures. Among those in the
courtroom on Wednesday was Akhmed Zakayev, a leader of Chechnya’s
separatist movement, who has successfully challenged efforts by
Russia to extradite him. Mr. Zakayev said in a telephone interview
that the killing of Mr. Yandarbiyev showed that Russia under Mr.
Putin had reverted to the darkest tactics of its Soviet past, when
K.G.B. agents tracked down enemies of the state overseas.
In U.S.-allied nations generally, anti-Russian
jihadists have, to a large extent, been sympathetically received,
and favorably reported (as in that cited NYT article).
So: Regardless of Putin’s success at dealing with
Islamic jihadists, his invitation to the United States to work
together to defeat the Sunni, and mainly Saudi and Thani-funded,
international movement for Islamic jihad for a global Caliphate,
will probably continue to meet only America’s cold shoulder. The
United States opposes Islamic jihad, but it opposes Russia more.
Or, at least, the U.S. Government does. Obama
primarily seeks
to defeat Russia, not to ally with it — not even against Islamic
jihad.
Investigative historian
Eric Zuesse is the author,
most recently, of They’re
Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records,
1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.