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Sometimes you have to take truth where you find it. Recently, we Americans have gotten a healthy and bitter dose of it from
the unlikely ministering of Russian President and ex-K.G.B. man Vladimir Putin, who has decided it is his job to tell us what
our official mouthpieces won't about our nation's behavior.
Putin's latest and most caustic moral corrective, which led most international news coverage today, was his sermon yesterday
at a security conference in Munich. In front of a slew of international leaders that included U.S. Defense Secretary Robert
Gates, Putin declared that "the United States has overstepped its national borders...in every area” through “unilateral”
and “illegitimate” military actions that “have not been able to resolve any matters at all” and "bring
us to the abyss of one conflict after another.” Thanks to the United States, he said, “political solutions are
becoming impossible.” In a cutting rejoinder to American rhetoric, Putin sniffed, “It has nothing in common with
democracy...Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations — military force...This
is the world of one master, one sovereign.” He went on to say that the United States has converted the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors elections in former Soviet-controlled states, “into a vulgar
instrument of ensuring the foreign policy interests of one country.” (New York Times, 2/11/07)
Whew. And those were just the highlights.
American leaders made a hollow show of surprise and rebuttal, the most unintentionally ironic of which came from Senator John
McCain, who responded to Putin with this howler: “In today’s multipolar world, there is no place for needless
confrontation.”
Putin, of course, has plenty of reasons to make a commotion chucking bricks at other people's glass houses. As the steely-eyed
boss of a repressive regime beset with rampant gangsterism and a depression-level economy, he has provided an easy target
for Bush's self-righteous barbs about democracy. Moreover, Putin has his own disastrous war against insurgents (in Chechnya)
on his hands, and he is under international suspicion of having ordered the recent slayings of two prominent Russian dissidents,
journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former K.G.B. agent and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko (she was shot in her apartment
building in Moscow; he was poisoned by radiation in London), as well as a long list of other political enemies who have been
murdered execution-style. Now that the American public has joined the rest of the world in recognizing Bush as a bully and
a buffoon, it's an opportune time for Putin to score points at W's expense.
But that doesn't stop Putin from being right about Bush. Sometimes the truth comes from strange places, including dishonest
and ruthless Russian autocrats who have an interest in drawing attention to the lies and hypocrisies of their American counterparts.
From what I can tell, in his Munich remarks Putin got only one thing wrong: he proclaimed that President Bush “is a
decent man, and one can do business with him.”
(Posted 2/11/07 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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