The louse that roared

Max Boot:

THE AMERICAN delegates to last weekend's Munich Conference on Security Policy, an annual transatlantic gathering of policymakers and defense experts, were not predisposed to embrace Vladimir Putin after we learned that the Russian president's entourage had booked more than 100 rooms in the conference hotel, the stately Bayerischer Hof, relegating most of us to a ho-hum Hilton in the hinterlands. (It could have been worse. As one journalist joked, if President Bush had been in attendance, the White House would have taken so many rooms that we would have been commuting from Lichtenstein.)

Putin's speech did not win over anyone either. Sounding as if he had stepped out of a Cold War time warp, he accused the U.S. and NATO of threatening his country. With its "hyper-use of force … " he thundered, "the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way…. No one feels safe anymore, because nobody can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them."

At a superficial level, his remarks might sound like the standard plaints from Western liberals about American "unilateralism," which is how they were portrayed in some European news accounts. But coming from such an illiberal leader, these comments had a different mien — sinister and absurd at once.

Putin, for instance, complained that a unipolar world order dominated by the U.S. was undemocratic. His concern might be touching if he hadn't spent the last few years dismantling the vestiges of Russia's own democracy. He dismissed questions about his increasingly despotic practices with doubletalk, claiming (falsely) that nongovernmental organizations haven't complained about harassment and (accurately) that more journalists have been killed in Iraq than in Russia. That hardly reassures those who suspect that Putin's security forces were behind the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and other investigative reporters.

Putin's condemnation of the U.S.' "illegitimate" use of force was no more convincing, given the scorched-earth campaign he has carried out in Chechnya. While insisting that the U.S. needs U.N. sanction for its military actions — which, he failed to note, was granted in Afghanistan and Iraq — he argued that Russia needed no such approval in Chechnya because it was acting in "self-defense." (Try telling that to a Chechen.)

Or consider Putin's claim that the U.S. was starting a new "arms race" by deploying missile defenses to Eastern Europe. This from the largest exporter of arms to the developing world, with clients that include such charmers as Syria and Venezuela. Putin actually had the nerve to claim that Russia's sale of $700 million worth of antiaircraft missiles to Iran, which will surely be used to defend Tehran's nuclear program, was a public service: "We don't want Iran to feel cornered. We want them to know they've got friends."

Putin did not win many friends in Munich with such remarks. He alienated the audience even more when he turned from criticizing the U.S. to deriding the innocuous Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which seeks to promote human rights and free elections, as a "vulgar instrument." In fact, Putin did the United States a favor by scaring the Europeans and showing why a transatlantic alliance remains necessary.

...

Putin knocks on the US while Russia acts as the bully with it oil and gas made little sense outside of Russia. Inside it might have been used to cover what a mess he and the Russians have made of their economy which now ranks below Mexico in GPD. He seems to fear a missile defense system that is aimed at deterring Iran while he is selling an air defense system to Iran. Where is he going with this other than to oppose for opposition sake.