Back in 2001, you'll recall -- months before 9/11 -- President Bush "looked into the eyes" of Russian president Vladimir Putin and told us that this was a man he could trust. Bush and Putin, the word was, had bonded -- as Bush always seems to -- through their mutual belief in a "Higher Power."
Well, now we know all about the kind of higher power Putin aspires to. In a story that should, perhaps, receive at least three percent of the attention the U.S. media have devoted to the grievances of Swift Boat Veterans and the peculiarities of IBM office machines circa 1972, The Russian leader has scuttled the flimsy remnants of democracy in his country, concentrating power in his hands and returning Russia to the kind of one-party rule it had for decades under the Communists -- this time with no lip service paid to Marxist theory. (In fact, a day after consolidating his power, Putin announced the formation of a humongous new Russian energy consortium open to Western investment. How convenient that he previously used the powers of his state to jail the head of Yukos, a competitor to the new energy firm, who'd begun to be active in the political opposition.) The rhetorical dressing today may be different from that in the days of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, but the brutal dynamics are familiar: Russia's brief trajectory from glasnost to perestroika to democracy has now boomeranged straight back to dictatorship.
The Bush administration, for its part, is shockingly mum in the face of this globally significant event (Colin Powell has "concerns"), but that shouldn't be a surprise. Putin may be an anti-democratic thug, but dammit, he's our thug -- a staunch ally in the War on Terror. And while Putin's putsch is a lot more aggressive than the PATRIOT Act, Russia's leader is cribbing from the same playbook Bush and Cheney used in the wake of 9/11: A terrorist disaster provides awfully good cover to roll out long-stewing policies (an invasion of Iraq for Bush, a suppression of democracy for Putin) that would be unpalatable except in a climate of fear and anger.
In this context, it hardly seems to matter that the awful terrorist acts confronting Putin's Russia stem mostly from Chechen separatists and ethnic conflicts between Ingush and Ossetians (let's hear Bush pronounce those names during the upcoming debates). So what if Russia's "war on terror" is an entirely different conflict from the United States' "war on terror"? Let's roll these conflicts up, unite our enemies and delude ourselves that Russia's decade-long war with Chechen guerrillas is morally aligned with the U.S.'s struggle against the perpetrators of 9/11. Since democracies like France, Germany and Spain can't be lined up to support Bush's ill-considered policies, then, hey, we'll have to take a strongman.
As a dictator sitting on a vast reserve of oil and decaying stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Vladimir Putin is looking more and more like a certain other Bush administration nemesis now awaiting trial in Baghdad. This time, though, it's okay: remember, we can trust Putin -- about as much as we can trust Bush.
POSTSCRIPT: President Bush has now weighed in. He is "worried," says the AP, that Putin's moves "could undermine democracy." This is like saying Bush's tax cuts "could undermine the budget surplus." The rhetorical device of transforming a fait accompli into a vague possibility may be expedient, but it's a pretty transparent dodge, and it effectively gives Putin a green light.
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