[NYTr] Bush anf His Gang 'grossly misjudged Putin'

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Steven L. Robinson activ-l

[The Russians are dead set opposed to US missile defense in neighboring
countries.  The US Government  goes forward with it anyway. It Doesn't
take, er, a rocket scientist to figure out that the Russian leadership
might be bit testy when their American counterparts come to visit. -SR]


McClatchy - Oct 12, 2007
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/20508.html

Bush, aides 'grossly misjudged Putin'

By Jonathan S. Landay

Washington - The Bush administration's failure to win Russia's consent
to install U.S. missile defenses in its European backyard and a growing
list of other disputes suggest that President Bush and his aides have
misread the man whose "soul" Bush thought he'd divined when they first
met six years ago.

Bush's strategy on Russia assumed that Russian President Vladimir Putin
embraced democracy, wanted integration with the West and sought a
"strategic partnership" in which Moscow would acquiesce to U.S.
policies such as NATO expansion. Feuds could be resolved through the
close personal relationship that Bush believed he had with his Russian
counterpart.

Instead, fueled by record oil and natural gas prices and resentment of
what he lambasted in February as Bush's "almost uncontained hyper use
of force," Putin has led global opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq,
hosted Palestinians on the U.S. list of terrorist groups, sold
anti-aircraft missiles and other arms to Iran and stymied Bush's drive
to tighten U.N. sanctions on the Islamic republic for refusing to
suspend uranium enrichment.

The Kremlin has steadily increased spending on defense modernization and
revived symbolic long-range aerial reconnaissance patrols toward U.S.
and European airspace.

Putin also has threatened to re-target Russian nuclear missiles at
Europe if Bush deploys U.S. missile defenses in Poland and the Czech
Republic, declared his intention to trash treaties that eliminate a
class of nuclear missiles and limit conventional military forces in
Europe and compared the United States under Bush to Germany under
Hitler.

The U.S.-Russian tensions are a far cry from June 2001, when Bush
declared after his first meeting with Putin in Slovenia that he'd
looked in the Russian leader's eyes, found him "trustworthy" and "was
able to get a sense of his soul."

Bush and his aides "grossly misjudged Putin," considering him "a good
guy and one of us," said Michael McFaul of Stanford University's Hoover
Institution.

The former KGB officer created that illusion partly by appearing to
share Bush's political and religious convictions, standard tradecraft
employed by intelligence officers to recruit spies, he said.

"Putin . . . is a brilliant case officer," said Carlos Pasqual, a former
senior State Department official now at The Brookings Institution, a
center-left policy organization in Washington.

What many experts regard as the real Putin - a hard-line, derisive
Russian nationalist - was on display Friday as he greeted visiting
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates
ahead of talks that failed to break the impasses over missile defense
and other key security issues.

After keeping the U.S. officials waiting for 40 minutes, Putin mocked
their mission in front of reporters and television cameras.

"Of course, we can sometime in the future decide that some anti-missile
defense should be established somewhere on the moon . . . ," he said.

U.S.-Russian tensions, already at their highest since the end of Cold
War, could worsen in coming months, fanning new regional instability.

If the United States unilaterally recognizes the independence of
Serbia's ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo province over Russia's
objections, Putin may respond by backing Serbia's annexation of
northern Kosovo, igniting an ethnic Albanian backlash.

The Kremlin also could recognize the independence of separatist
enclaves in the pro-Western former Soviet republics of Moldova and
Georgia, encouraging Serb nationalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina to revive
a succession drive that ended in 1995.

U.S. policy came to pivot on Putin even though Rice, the
administration's top Russia expert, had lambasted former President
Clinton for being overly cozy with the Russian leader's predecessor,
Boris Yeltsin.

Despite their emphasis on promoting democracy, Bush, Rice and other U.S.
officials said little about massive human rights abuses in Chechnya,
Putin's gradual rollback of democratic and economic reforms and his
suppression of Russia's independent media.

The 2001 al Qaida attacks in New York and Washington led to
unprecedented security and intelligence-sharing cooperation between the
United States and Russia, which was struggling to contain a costly
Muslim guerrilla war in Chechnya.

"We wanted him on our side in the global war on terror," said Pasqual.

Putin backed the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, including America's
use of bases in former Soviet republics, and acquiesced in the U.S.
withdrawal from a Cold War treaty prohibiting the deployment of
anti-ballistic missile systems.

Emerging from years of financial chaos that had hobbled its military,
Russia quickly concluded a 2002 nuclear arms reduction pact mostly on
Bush's terms.

Putin, however, began to sour on the relationship as Bush promoted the
inclusion of former Warsaw Pact nations in NATO and supported the
elections of pro-Western governments in the former Soviet republics of
Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

U.S. officials refused to accept "that the Russians do have an interest
in what they call their 'near abroad,'" said a former top State
Department official who requested anonymity to speak more freely. "The
Russians would have differences of opinion with us, and we would not
acknowledge that we had differences of opinions."