If the U.S. cedes Iraq, and Iran remains under Russian Federation Security Council and nuclear sponsorship, then Iranian power to influence Shiite-dominated Iraq with Russian help, will put the energy reserves of Iraq, Iran and Russia in the same geopolitical camp. That camp is not about democracy.
And so the option of leaving Iraq to the Shiites could play into a major shift in the balance of power in the world, in the favor of Shanghai Cooperation Organization states, many of which have invoked U.N. principles to protect their authoritarian and Communist regimes from outside scrutiny, pressure and financial leveraging. The regimes want to be treated democratically on the world economic scene, however, do not want to pass that treatment down to their peoples.
The movement of the RF toward military and economic alliance with the People's Republic of China seems to have intensified if not begun in earnest after the U.S. bombed traditional Russian ally Serbia, and the People's Republic of China saw its embassy take some laser-misguided bombs from NATO aircraft.
The RF, by 2004 had already been snubbed by the Pentagon on eligibility to bid for reconstruction contracts, and had already indignantly refused the Bush Administration's request to forgive Iraq's debt. Between March 2003 and December 2003, the Putin regime was in some limbo as to whether it could gain US favor and access to Iraqi reconstruction contract bidding. The Bush Administration, with evidence of Russian assistance to Saddam's regime, was not in the mood. As speculation circulated that only participants in the invasion and security operations would be allowed to bid, the Putin regime began cracking down on Russian oil giant Yukos.
By the time the Pentagon made it official in December 2003 announcement that the RF was out of the initial bidding, I believe the RF had already seen the writing on the wall during Putin's September 2003 visit to the US. The Putin regime then began completing its retaliation by arresting Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorovsky, killing all hopes of a free Yukos, Yukos-Sibneft, or any other private arrangement independent of the state. The RF asserted state control through acquisition of Yukos assets by a shell company for the state called BaikalFinans (see linked to study, infra), eventually to drift into the orbit of state oil mammoth Gazprom. Today, rumors place Vladimir V. Putin at the head of Gazrprom after leaving office, if he leaves office.
The indirect nationalization of Yukos et al. seemed to hit the retaliatory mark if you consider this Baker Instititute Energy Forum supported assessment as an expression of pain, published under the auspices of Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, which doesn't guarantee agreement with the author's views.
With Russia second only to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves and first in natural gas, if you add the collective reserves of Iran, Venezuela and Iraq to the geopolitical mix, the energy leverage in the world turns toward the Russian Federation, itself relying on exchange of fuel and weapons with the PRC for PRC manufacturing muscle, shared (stolen) secrets and copyrights from the West and cheap goods for Russian consumption.
Also, the RF is seizing the opportunity to share contempt for the morally corrupt West by coupling its Russian Orthodox nationalism with certain Islamic interests in sympathy to Palestineans. The Russian Federation simultaneously pulls in close to Chinese Communist Party hardliners who share an ideologic, if hypocritical hatred for the "decadent West" although decadent means different things between them. My suspicion is that the PRC and RF, once it is perceived that they have wrested geopolitical hegemony from the U.S., will fan Middle Eastern hatred directed Westward to the degree possible, and turn against Islamic states only when physical jihad turns on them.
As the U.S. appears caught between rocks in Iraq, with the Kurds' or the Sunni's security hanging in the balance, Russia makes overtures to Turkey by supplying her with affordable petroleum resources, while sponsoring Iran and supplying Iran-Syria with traditional arms support to destabilize Lebanon, keep power at home, and keep Israel off-balance via Hezbollah. Turkey wants no independence for the Kurds, and neither does Iran. And so, the RF seeks to isolate the U.S. in Iraq, and to pick its efforts apart via Israeli and Lebanese diversions coupled with constant internal agitation among the rifts in Iraq. And the Western and some Eastern Christian confessions of the Middle East are suffering more now than they have in some time in Lebanon and Iraq symbolizing hatred of the "crusaders," however irrational the scapegoating.
While some U.S. press outlets historically ran late 1990s reports on alleged weak-kneed, covert U.S. support to anti-Saddam forces in Iraq (including the to the Kurds), suggesting abandonment of forces which Saddam Hussen then wiped out, many now editorialize about getting out of Iraq and leaving the Kurds high and dry again, or, damaging U.S. alliances with Sunni governments sympathetic to Iraqi Sunnis under Shiite dominance. A wild-card factor in my view: Ba'ath Party mutuality, if any between Iraq's Sunni's and Syria's counterpart Ba'ath Party, running counter to Russian-Iranian-Shiite designs on Iraq. Here, must Russia choose between Syrian and Iranian interests in Iraq?
The bottom line of this essay: it isn't about surges in Iraq anymore. It is about the energy-rich Middle East powers as leverage points weighted by an emerging new Eastern partnership of non-Western energetic and economic hegemonists against the U.S. and E.U. Unfortunately, the U.S. and E.U. have enough people who buy into the propaganda from the RF that distrust of Putin's regime equals Russophobia.
The U.S. must choose whether to use overwhelming force to take Iraq with decisive imperial dictatorial fiat for as long as it takes to convert U.S. energies to alternative technologies (fish), or to cut bait. Cutting bait means leaving Iraq after the safest possible withdrawal for U.S. troops, i.e. finding other means of balancing world power relationships with the rising Eastern powers, and re-align. This would cut a serious bleed, and, the U.S. must reinvest in its infrastructure, both civilian and military.
I submit that some dictatorial fiat in forcing U.S. domestic oil firms under emergency war powers to fully develop alternative energy technologies for U.S. transportation on a fast track would be more effective than attempting it in Iraq for the long-haul.
Or, perhaps movements in North Africa anticipate a drive to North African oil and other mineral stakes for the U.S. and its allies while making the requisite shifts out of Iraqi oil dependence toward the new technologies. I forward the view that particularly aggressive U.S. development of alternative energy and technologies is priority one for the Bush Administration to save itself from becoming the Administration that let Putin's regime do a Judo slam on the Reagan-Bush-1 gains of the 80's.
I also suggest that the reason the PRC has recently given a Falun Gong civil rights lawyer a light sentence while North Korea and Cuba both allow establishment of a Russian Orthodox Churches on their soil under the Putin-friendly Moscow Patriarchate, is to play to the Russian Federation propaganda push to "join" non-Chechen Islam against the decadent West while showing that the PRC and RF "respect" religion by appearances that satisfy their Islamic clients for the historical mid-run. You see, the Moscow Patriarchate has played friendly to Fatah in the past, even as Moscow has reached out to Hamas. By sympathy with Palestine against the U.S.-Israel alliance, the RF seeks to win the "dominoes" of ME energy powers to its side. It doesn't hurt for it to have Venezuela in its corner, either.
There are some as yet unissued "peace dividends" which might also need to be called in by the U.S. to keep from losing ground entirely to a new non-democratic group of nations.
My suggestion is that EU energy contracts were won by the Russian Federation under the auspices of Russian Federation liberalization, which has not happened, i.e. misrepresentation. Ditto for WTO status and G8 elevation. It was a fraud.
In addition, Russian Federation negligence in health care spending is now creating new disease vectors and security vulnerabilities as an NBC weapons state in geographic contiguity with Europe to which many unemployed Russians flee to work illegally. And then there are the black market ducts to and from NBC facilities in Russia, posing prospective proliferation and apocalyptic nightmares for the future.
This has miffed EU members, however, which also remain miffed at the US. The EU will need to decide whether to continue playing the high moral ground versus the U.S. while losing ground to the authoritarian (totalitarian?) East, considering that a good many colonial adventures which have enriched them mightily can and will continually be used by the RF and PRC against their interests as former colonial nations decide whose energy leveraging to patronize with their developing energy resource wealth: the SCO nations or the EU/US.
One thing that has been encouraging is that the PRC has a strong pragmatic streak which could give-way to technologies that offer to free it from its fears of keeping a cap on freedom implications for such a massive populace, and security that could cause a territorial break-up of certain regions in China. Also, the PRC fears Uighers over Falun Gong any day, however, freedom for one invites more of the other in its ruling communistic atheist dogma. This will at some point force light on the RF's use of the Church to reach its political ends.
If the U.S. is to turn part-realist on the East via the Middle East, it will need to do it by trading in chips on global warming and other issues important to the EU, while developing technologies at home with an urgency no less intense than that which both denied and beat the Axis powers' access to the atom bomb.
