Article

2005-04-30 Israel-Palestine

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by Fred 2005-04-30 00:00:00 AM|| || Front Page|| [9 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 I think Putty has come completely unraveled. There are far more constructive and intelligent ways of Russia getting hard currency than building nuke reactors for Iran and Egypt, and the notion he should be taken up on his offer to host a M.E. summit just bit the big one, I'd say. Putty & Co are diving off the cliff willingly. Anyone got some solid reasoning for the current Russian FP choices? I see alternatives, such as joint efforts with the US and/or US business, that make more sense than this willful decision to go it alone. And as far as I can see, that's exactly where they are, utterly alone.

Posted by .com 2005-04-30 2:03:38 AM|| 2005-04-30 2:03:38 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 I don't know why but I kinda like Puty. He is imploding, can't return to the old ways, and must adopt new ones,so economically boosting his country while helping to stabilize the volatile ME, may actually help with our Roadmap to Peace. The Euros have snubbed him, the Pope dismantled the Iron Curtain, he's been plagued with terrorism and incompetents undermining him, and he has few friends except President Bush. He says he can track the missile sales to Syria, so maybe everything will leave a trail and lead directly to the terrorists if intercepted for other purposes. If we can track individual Viagra tablets, we should be able to track most anything. There are micro-chips with GPS capability that can even be implanted into enemy combatants, but don't tell the ACLU!

Posted by Danielle 2005-04-30 10:38:02 AM|| 2005-04-30 10:38:02 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 may actually help with our Roadmap to Peace

?

Posted by Shipman 2005-04-30 11:14:41 AM|| 2005-04-30 11:14:41 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 "the Pope dismantled the Iron Curtain"

Double ?

Posted by 98zulu 2005-04-30 3:39:06 PM|| 2005-04-30 3:39:06 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 Anyone got some solid reasoning for the current Russian FP choices?

My take is that Putin's not really calling the shots; his FSB handlers are. These are unreconstructed sovki, old soviet hacks, whose thinking follows the logic of what the sovs called the "correlation of forces": seeking advantage based solely on raw calculations of relative power. The strategic theatres are to Russia's immediate south, and things have gone disastrously for Russia in the eyes of the sovki across every front: Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Kyrgyszstan, Romania/Bulgaria as NATO staging points....

From this viewpoint, Russia's main goal is not to join the WTO or integrate with the west or stimulate the non-resource-based economy but to counter, thwart, check, match or see 'n' raise Bush wherever they can. Which means seeking to subvert our goals in the middle east and exploring areas of cooperation with China. (Note that the natural gas weapon has worked like a charm in cowing the Germans and French into submission-- no further attention needed to the western front.) This is a reactionary approach, in every sense of the word. Reacting to Bush and the advance of democracy across nearly every one of Russia's flanks. Sounds like panic to me. I doubt Putin will survive beyond two years.

Posted by thibaud (aka lex) 2005-04-30 3:53:53 PM|| 2005-04-30 3:53:53 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 lex - That description certainly fits the facts. I'll have to digest it better to see whatever they see regards the logic of opposition for opposition's sake. Sounds like pure habit, not logic. Perhaps the KGB wasn't as politically sophisticated as I gave it credit for.

Putty, as the face of the regime, must be quite problematic. The idiocy of his cult following, the pop idol status given by young Russian airheads, must be comical to those pulling the strings. It will be a nuisance when the time comes that Putty either fails to cooperate or has outlived his usefulness.

Okay, regards who is behind the curtain... I presume you're saying ex-KGB and Russian mafiosi? Can you describe it better for me? I may be the world's least enthusiastic conspiracist, but you've mentioned the string-pullers several times and I can only guess at the 2 types I mentioned above.

Didn't a very high-ranking and rather debonair (excellent English, smooth talking, not scary-KGB-looking, etc.) ex-KGB General die just a few months ago? I knew the face from TV - crap like 60 Minutes - a frequently interviewed post-collapse voice of calm and perspective. Probably their disinformation specialist.

I really am disgusted with Russia thoroughly pissing away their one golden opportunity to break with the past and forge a decent future. The potential wasted. I know, for a fact, that many US oil companies would've spent large sums to help them refurbish their petro infrastructure, that segment of their industry that will generate most of their hard currency for the foreseeable future, but were jerked around and screwed over at every step in the bidding process. Total waste of goodwill, a huge capital resource, and time. It just boggles how mishandled things are. If it's just that the trogs never lost control, well, I guess that means the opportunity was a mirage.

Got any predictions for the future beyond the 2 yr shelf-life of Putty? I won't hold you to anything, just curious. What a waste is all I can say. Good people, rich in resources, good technical reservoir - and what happens? Shit. Shit happens.

Posted by .com 2005-04-30 5:06:15 PM|| 2005-04-30 5:06:15 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 t aka lex puts together a scenario that ignores completely domestic politics. Does the U. S. prepare its foreign policy in a vacuum? I think Puty is the little Dutch boy running from one hole in the dike to the next. His strategy is explicable in retrospect only.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-04-30 5:32:05 PM|| 2005-04-30 5:32:05 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Mrs D, there is no opposition in Russia today. The liberals continue to fight among themselves and have no real following outside Moscow anyway. The only real opposition are the Communists, who've largely been co-opted by ~~the FSB~~ Putin's strong-man neo-soviet posturing.

The real game in Russia is entirely within the government. Which is to say that our clueless MSM correspondents won't shed any light whatsoever on this at all. Check out moscowtimes.ru, esp Pavel Felgenhauer's occasional column, for insights.

Posted by thibaud (aka lex) 2005-04-30 10:46:09 PM|| 2005-04-30 10:46:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 I presume you're saying ex-KGB and Russian mafiosi? Can you describe it better for me?

The FSB have their fingers in a lot of pies. Consider that nearly all of Russia's spectacular fortunes are derived from commodity goods shipped across borders, and then ask yourself, Who controls the borders in a nation whose government has effectively cesased to govern?

Put it another way: it was the security services, and to a subsidiary degree the Party apparat, that created the mechanisms and modalities during the soviet era for funneling money abroad to foreign communist parties. In the free-for-all that was the Gorbachev era, this translated into massive corruption and transfers of huge amounts of gold and hard-currency reserves abroad. So when capitalism came along, who was best situated to move funds offshore from oil trading arbitrages? Ex`communists, particularly those with experience in the finance or economics ministries and those with an intimate knowledge of the foreign-subsidiary funding mechanisms described above. Scratch an "oligarch" and you'll as likely as not find an ex-Komsomol or son-of-a-Foreign Ministry official. And behind them-- the "junior" oligarchs, as it were-- are certainly high-placed officials in the security services.

It is these two groups, one in the govt and one outside the govt, both of them symbiotically linked, who call the shots in Russia today. The Yukos affair is a contest between two sets of corrupt, in fact criminal, insider groups. The FSB won out.

That's my reading, anyway. No foreigner really has the inside dope on this govt. The NYT's reporting on this is laughable. For good guesses, check out PAvel Felgenhauer on the military or a sharp western analyst, Chris Weafer, who's head of research at Alfa Bank in Moscow.

Posted by thibaud (aka lex) 2005-04-30 10:58:17 PM|| 2005-04-30 10:58:17 PM|| Front Page Top

00:00 Old Patriot
23:16 Old Patriot
23:16 Fred
23:04 thibaud (aka lex)
23:02 thibaud (aka lex)
22:59 Old Patriot
22:59 CrazyFool
22:58 .com
22:58 thibaud (aka lex)
22:46 thibaud (aka lex)
22:41 phil_b
22:34 thibaud (aka lex)
22:32 .com
22:28 thibaud (aka lex)
22:27 thibaud (aka lex)
22:22 Atomic Conspiracy
22:21 Eric Jablow
22:19 .com
22:19 thibaud (aka lex)
22:19 SwissTex
22:17 thibaud (aka lex)
22:14 JosephMendiola
22:12 Dan Darling
21:55 JosephMendiola