#1
Comment: Acting as if Russia doesn't count
By Martin Sieff (sieff.yavelak@erols.com)
Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- A dangerous attitude toward Russia has taken hold across the senior foreign and defense policy officials of the Bush administration: "You don't matter any more. And even when you do, you have to do as we tell you anyway."

These very sentiments have been repeatedly expressed privately -- and not so privately -- in recent weeks by not one but several policymakers holding key positions in both the State Department and the Department of Defense. And they do indeed appear to be an accurate description of the general Bush administration policies towards what is still the one nation on earth capable of annihilating the United States with a comparable strategic nuclear arsenal.

From Sept. 11 to mid-December, it was all very different. Then, Russia was by far the most important ally the United States had in the world, far eclipsing Britain, Japan, Germany, France or any other major nation of Western Europe or East Asia.

Russian support was crucial for establishing U.S. military forces in Central Asia as operating bases from which to hammer the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that protected the al Qaeda terrorist group responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Towers and the mauling of the Pentagon.

The Northern Alliance forces that proved so effective at ousting the Taliban with U.S. military aid had been longtime allies of Russia. Russian aid and connections proved crucial in establishing rapid and effective cooperation with them.

But once the Taliban was toppled, the attitudes of senior Bush officials reverted to the complacent arrogance that had characterized their attitude to Russia before the terrible terrorist attacks of Black Tuesday.

U.S officials have been giving the Russians dictats on anti-ballistic missile policy and regarding only full compliance with their demands as reasonable "negotiations." Now U.S. officials are taking the line that the U.S. military presence in Central Asia must continue for the foreseeable future.

The specific line being formulated by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, according to Pentagon insiders, is that the Russians are not being told the U.S. presence in their historic back yard for the last half a millennium will be permanent. The official line being expressed is that it will only be for an indefinite time. According to the level of strategic thinking currently prevalent in the Pentagon, the Russians are supposed to be assured by this formulation that it will not be permanent, even though that is what is intended.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has always walked and talked softly in public, has been careful not to confront the United States head on. Indeed, he is currently being severely criticized in Moscow for cooperating with the new U.S. military presence in the Caucasus republic of Georgia to root out al Qaeda groups entrenched there.

Therefore so far, Putin has not responded to any of these U.S. moves with anger. But the rage in Moscow both in the press and among key policymakers has been palpable. Fierce-anti-American sentiments are far more commonly held and expressed among both groups than they ever where in the last years of the Soviet Union under President Mikhail Gorbachev.

There is no sense of alarm or concern either at Foggy Bottom or across the Potomac in the Pentagon that President Putrin may be willing or capable of taking hostile and harmful action to U.S. interests in retaliation for policies and insults. There is certainly no thought at all given to the possibility that even if he maintains cautious cooperation with Washington, he may be in danger of being eventually toppled and replaced with others who would prefer confrontation.

Yet Putin himself last June 15 signed a far reaching agreement to set up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or Shanghai Pact, a Eurasian military defense organization teaming Russia and China that was modeled on the old Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. It openly proclaimed its ambition of expelling U.S. influence from the heartland of Asia. Since then U.S. influence in the short term has grown exponentially there. But it remains to be seen if that influence is sustainable in the long term.

The U.S. influence in Central Asia that now so angers Russians is being defended by administration officials as being strategically crucial to maintain open access to the new oil and gas reserves being developed in the Caspian Basin.

But the Caspian Basin is hundreds of miles to the west of nations like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan where the new U.S. presence is being established. And even if it were far closer, the odds are overwhelming against the United States being able to establish itself as a permanent presence in a region it has never known and does not understand. And it will have to maintain that presence in the face of opposition from the Russians, Chinese and Iranians who surround it on every side.

Besides, the more the United States pours resources into maintaining a military presence, the less it will have to maintain its simultaneous presence in the Persian Gulf and to defend Taiwan. And in both regions, current U.S. policies require maintaining overwhelming military superiority for the indefinite future against powerful regional powers fiercely opposed to them.

Of course, if Russia really doesn't matter any more, these traditional arguments of geopolitical common sense would no longer apply. And the opinion is now virtually universally held across the Bush administration that Russia indeed remains prostrate and will not matter for a very long time to come, if ever again.

Perhaps they are correct. But a lot of powerful and important people -- including Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler -- have destroyed themselves and their countries in that same belief.