Strongman, The
in this way he was wiping out the population of Chechnya?
Perhaps the poor Le Monde correspondent did not know that this was Putin’s rawest nerve. By merely asking such a question, he was in Putin’s eyes a terrorist sympathiser. ‘If you’re so keen to be an Islamic radical,’ he railed at the journalist, ‘and are happy to be circumcised, then I invite you to Moscow. We are a multi-faith country and have specialists for this. And I’ll recommend they do the operation so thoroughly that you have nothing left to grow back.’
This happened just one week before the Prague summit – a handy reminder to NATO’s old and new members that Putin, perhaps, was not quite ready to join the civilised world.
Allies against the Iraq war
Had President Putin deployed such crude language with regard to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein he might have earned a wry smile and some kudos in Washington. But the growing confrontation with Iraq was to drive another wedge between Russia and America, and demonstrate that, when it came to pursuing its foreign policy goals, Washington scarcely pretended that Russia was a superpower that mattered: certainly they would court Putin to try to get his backing, but if they failed it would not hold them back. The Bush administration was no more interested in taking Russia’s advice on Iraq than Clinton had been on Yugoslavia.
The Iraq crisis had been deepening throughout 2002, as suspicions grew that Saddam Hussein was continuing to produce and store weapons of mass destruction, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions. A new resolution, number 1441, passed on 8 November 2002 after two months of tough negotiations, gave Iraq a ‘final opportunity’ to disarm or face ‘serious consequences’. Weapons inspectors returned to Iraq in late November. Over the coming months they discovered no banned weapons, but Iraq failed to prove they had destroyed stockpiles that had previously been documented. The diplomatic confrontation that now developed centred on two things: whether the weapons inspectors should be given longer to complete their task (as the chief inspector, Hans Blix, wished), and what to do next – given that Resolution 1441 did not authorise the use of force. It pitted the US and the UK, broadly speaking, against Russia, France and Germany. Since Russia and France were permanent members of the Security Council with the power of veto, it was clear that the US and Britain would not be able to push through a second resolution, authorising military action. The Americans disdainfully referred to the Putin–Schröder–Chirac alliance as the ‘axis of weasels’ – an ironic reference to Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ (Iraq, Iran and North Korea). US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld inadvertently alienated France and Germany still further when he referred to them disparagingly as ‘Old Europe’, as opposed to the more obliging ex-communist countries to the east – ‘New Europe’ – which by and large supported the American position.
Putin was implacably opposed to American plans to invade Iraq, for many reasons. Russia had major business interests there; it worried that oil prices could slump if Iraqi oil flooded the market after the war; it bristled at what it saw as US unilateralism, overriding international decisions; it opposed the hidden agenda of regime change; it felt UN weapons inspectors should be allowed to continue their work searching for weapons of mass destruction; and it wanted to exhaust all of its own diplomatic avenues to persuade Saddam Hussein to back down or resign from office. Putin was fully signed up to the war on terror, but unlike Bush he did not regard Iraq as a state that sponsored terrorism.
The Russians were dismissive of the unconvincing presentation given by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Security Council on 5 February 2003, purporting to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ‘We were shown photos taken from space,’ Sergei Ivanov recalls, ‘huge trucks, juggernauts, carrying chemical weapons. They said that it was reliable evidence. We said, “Well, maybe you have this intelligence, but we don’t.” ’ 12
Putin was not, however, initially inclined to spoil his budding relationship with George W. Bush by making a public stand. At first he stuck in his public pronouncements to a position of guarded support for American efforts to ensure Saddam’s disarmament. He told French
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher