Russia Rears Up against US-Aggression
- Simon Kiwek
- vor 6 Tagen
- 12 Min. Lesezeit
Russia joined Europe in opposing the 2003 Iraq invasion — and was brushed aside. The lesson Moscow drew was simple: no US ally along its borders, whatever the cost.
The following passage deals with Russia's pushback against Washington's manufactured justifications for the Iraq War — and the watershed moment it represented in Putin's foreign policy thinking. It is drawn from Part III of the book.
Similar to regimes vis-à-vis their populations, empires also possess a toolbox in dealing with their vassal states. This, too, ranges from co-optation to repression in order to keep them within their own coalition. The Soviet empire never possessed particular radiance, as the uprisings in Prague or Budapest demonstrated. In the 1990s, the Kremlin lost its last remaining attractiveness. Within a very short time, all vassal states bid farewell in order to move into the orbit of other powers – or to try it on their own.
The Caucasus – A Mosaic
In the northern Caucasus, the Muslim-influenced provinces of Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya – a complex mixture of ethnicities with centuries-old traditions – drifted toward independence. Under international law, however, they were not entitled to it, since they were sub-republics within Russia. The renegade Chechnya became the scene of Russian interventions twice.
During the first Chechen war in 1994, the Russian army was still so weak that it could not take on the heavily armed rebels – they possessed leftover Soviet stockpiles and received support from Islamist mujahideen from the Middle East as well as Ukrainian nationalists. Russia could not even conquer Russia, people scoffed.
In 1999, Putin reopened the war. In violation of the Khasavyurt accords, he marched once again into the autonomous Republic of Chechnya after the region had never truly come to rest. Foreign jihadists struck the Caucasus with bombing terror. When the Russian army had finished its counterstrike on the Chechen capital Grozny, the United Nations described it as the most heavily destroyed city in the world.
This set alarm bells ringing in the Eastern and Central Eastern European countries: Russia was still a hegemonic colonial power that enforced its interests in its neighborhood by force, according to the French historian Mary Sarotte. [42]
Instead of being satisfied with a narrow-gauge version in the form of the Partnership for Peace with NATO, these countries sought full membership, which, with Article 5, also guaranteed collective defense. Yet this drew a new border in Europe that did not include Ukraine.
Brothers in Arms Against Terror
At the same time, the mood between Russia and America in the period after September 11, 2001, was at a high point. In 2002, Moscow itself was shaken by a terrorist attack when Islamist Chechens held 850 people hostage for four days in the Dubrovka Theater. This hostage-taking ended with the death of 130 people.
Vladimir Putin and George Bush felt like brothers in arms in the common struggle against Islamist terror – the one in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the other in the Caucasus. Russia supported US operations in Afghanistan by opening its airspace to US military aircraft and accepting bases in the Central Asian Uzbekistan.
After the change of power to Putin, Moscow even warmed to NATO’s eastward expansion. The predecessor Boris Yeltsin, regarded as pro-Western, had still sworn in 1995 to prevent it. Russia faced a decision: either it joined the globally dominant coalition or it worked against it – a strategy very costly in the long run.
The Kremlin chose cooperation. In fact, Russia purchased Washington’s goodwill and was even able to exert influence over NATO in Eastern Europe. In return, the USA gave Moscow a free hand in Chechnya. The chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated at the time:
“No Russian leader since Peter the Great has aligned himself so closely with the West as Vladimir Putin.” [43]
This was none other than today’s US President and bitter adversary of Vladimir Putin in the latter’s invasion of Ukraine: Joe Biden. What went wrong since then?
Moscow’s cooperation was based on the assumption that the USA, in return, would take Russia’s security interests seriously and continue to treat it with the status due to a great power.
The UN: A Dignity-Less Event
Only a short time later, after Joe Biden had still described Russia and Putin as one of the closest allies in the fight against international Islamist terrorism, the USA transformed into a superpower that at any price wanted to unleash a war in violation of international law. The following story takes us back once again to Iraq in 2003.
Before the Security Council, the former army general and Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the alleged evidence of the USA for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This presentation provided the pretext to march into Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
After September 11, groups all over the world outdid one another in trying to peddle their information about al-Qaeda to the USA in order to draw it to their side. The Kurds in northern Iraq did not depend on this – the USA already supported them with a no-fly zone that protected them from Saddam’s reach after he had carried out poison gas attacks against them in the late 1980s as part of Operation Anfal. Thus, a de facto autonomous Kurdistan emerged.
Exactly one week before September 11, the Kurds handed the USA a dossier on Ansar al-Islam, a radical group active on their territory. Ansar al-Islam indeed maintained contacts with al-Qaeda and Afghanistan but radicalized itself above all after its fighters had fought on Tehran’s side in the Iran–Iraq war and later in Afghanistan against the Soviets. When they returned to their place of origin, Halabja in Kurdish northern Iraq, they began to build a strict Islamic caliphate. The Kurdish government expelled them; since then they vegetated in the mountains on the border with Iran.
Now Colin Powell accused them before the UN of producing the nerve agent ricin on behalf of Saddam and al-Qaeda and thereby threatening America – and this of all places on the territory of a de facto sovereign Kurdistan allied with the USA, to which Saddam had hardly any access.
“A secular dictator joining forces with a radical Islamist whose goal was to overthrow secular dictators and establish a caliphate?”
doubted the US journalist John Walcott, who had been dealing with Iraq for years. [44] Saddam Hussein was at best a habitual Muslim. That Ansar al-Islam, who were allied with his archenemy Iran, should work for him made no sense.
In panic, Ansar al-Islam even invited journalists to see for themselves on site that no production facilities for weapons of mass destruction existed there. [45] Colin Powell nevertheless claimed this before the UN on February 5, 2003. To make matters worse, Powell even falsely named the neighboring village of Khurmal as the group’s location. The inhabitants there fell into panic – so little effort did the Americans make in lying.
Lies for War
The Kurds bear no blame for Powell’s false accusations, according to Quil Lawrence, long-time BBC correspondent in the region. The Bush administration and large parts of the US press were only too ready to believe any accusation against Saddam – they wanted to wage war. [110]
Powell’s performance became even more absurd when he pulled an informant with the codename “Curveball” out of his hat. Behind this stood the exile Iraqi Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a trained chemical engineer who had applied for asylum in Germany in 1999.
Al-Janabi claimed to have been part of a team of scientists operating mobile laboratories mounted on trucks in which biological weapons had allegedly been produced. UN inspectors under Hans Blix examined one of the buildings he had named and found there merely a seed-processing plant.
German intelligence services soon classified Curveball as crazy and unreliable; friends even described him as a habitual liar. Even the CIA had already realized before September 11 that the facilities he described exhibited considerable technical deficiencies and were hardly suitable for producing biological weapons. [46]
Nevertheless, the Iraqi living on social welfare in Stuttgart became the core piece of the indictment against Saddam Hussein. Powell used him as the central element of his advocacy for war. The former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is convinced: The Bush administration did not care whether Curveball knew what he was talking about – what mattered was simply to be able to present “evidence” at all – the graphics department then drew the non-existent mobile chemical weapons laboratories for Powell’s presentation. [47]
Looking back, Tyler Drumheller, then CIA chief in Europe, admitted to the Los Angeles Times: Everyone in the chain of command up to the government knew about Curveball’s low credibility. [48]
Even in Iraq, liberated from Saddam’s reign of terror, the verdict is devastating. The Minister for Tribal Affairs Jamal al-Battikh declared:
“This man has led Iraq into a catastrophe and a disaster. The Iraqis paid a high price for his lies. The invasion in 2003 destroyed Iraq’s basic infrastructure. […] This man is not welcome here; rather, the Iraqis should put him on trial for his lies.” [49]
The Media Fall in Line
The worst part of it: Colin Powell was regarded as an upright general with high credibility. His appearance before the UN convinced many doubters; Powell himself later called this speech the low point of his career.
But even more decisive: Anyone who wanted to know could have known. The media, actually an organ of control in a democracy, largely failed in the USA. An exception was the now-defunct newspaper publisher Knight Ridder, at the time the largest US newspaper chain, which primarily supplied papers in the Midwest with texts and investigations.
Those very regions that elites on the East and West Coasts liked to disparage as “flyover states” – populated, supposedly, with “hillbillies” with whom one did not wish to concern oneself more closely. The bureau chief of Knight Ridder in Washington explained the motivation of his editorial team:
“Our readers are not in Washington or New York. They are not the people who send other people’s children to war. They are the people who get sent to war. We felt obliged to explain to them why this is happening – so we had to check the government as best we could.” [50]
He assigned the journalists Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, Joe Galloway, and John Walcott (he has already been mentioned) to the topic. They published a series of articles that openly contradicted the official narrative about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction – a narrative that made no sense in itself.
Even years later, the established American media landscape dealt with its failure to control the government. From the New York Times to the Washington Post, nationally circulating publications vehemently rejected the investigations of the four journalists. On the contrary: they defamed them as unpatriotic, disloyal, and anti-American. [51]
The Truth Lay in the Open
The UN inspectors under chief inspector Hans Blix had attested to Saddam Hussein a high degree of willingness to cooperate in their search for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. The inspectors regularly published reports that were publicly accessible – any editorial office could have compared the statements of the US government with them.
Journalists could also have called experts at universities or research institutes at any time to examine the technical details. The major media did neither the one nor the other. The USA wanted this war as revenge for September 11 – and a large part of the press did not question this logic.
Instead, they allowed the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to serve them one fantastic story after another – only a few years after the infamous incubator lie with which the second Gulf War had already been emotionally prepared. At that time, the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA had posed as a nurse and told the American public that Iraqi soldiers had torn premature babies from incubators and left them to die.
The protagonists and witnesses of the INC even adapted their biographies depending on the audience. Walcott had met the chairman of the INC, al-Chalabi, already in 1995. His judgment of him:
“I wouldn’t even dress in the morning according to him if he told me what the weather is. Let alone go to war.” [44]
In Washington, by contrast, al-Chalabi always found an open ear. The US government generously financed the INC, although it had hardly any support within Iraq itself. After the invasion, Washington even installed the exile Iraqi as interim leader – al-Chalabi seized the opportunity and began to style himself as an autocrat.
Of All Countries, Russia Fights for a Rules-Based World Order
Powell’s appearance made it clear: The USA was determined to attack Iraq – with or without the approval of the UN Security Council. Washington virtually expected the Kremlin’s support for its ultimatum in the Security Council.
Instead, Moscow allied itself with France and China and voted against the US motion. Russia had no significant security-policy or economic interests in Iraq. Russia’s veto stemmed above all from concern for the international order. The recently achieved closeness of the two nuclear powers in the fight against Islamist terror clouded over abruptly.
Putin developed an intense travel activity from China to India and on to Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, which had recently moved geopolitically toward Washington. The aim was to induce the USA to operate within the framework of the United Nations. Moscow wanted to dissuade Washington from its invasion plans.
For this purpose, it even allied itself with the Western European powers France and Germany, which likewise condemned America’s plans. Turkey, after all the second-largest NATO army, also refused Washington its allegiance and closed its territory to the invasion army.
On French television, Putin declared:
“The most important thing is that France and Russia are building common approaches for constructing a framework of international security. Like France’s president [Chirac], Russia believes in an architecture of world security based on a multipolar world. […] I am convinced that only then can the world be predictable and stable, if it is multipolar.”
At that time, Putin thus sought a world in which the great powers kept one another in check through balance and control. In the Kremlin, one hoped in this way to contain the negative consequences of American hegemony.
The Russian Great Power Fails
Instead, one had to watch as the USA degraded the UN Security Council into a mere signing machine. The Security Council was to legitimize only Washington’s decisions. The USA equated its economic and military supremacy practically with a blank check to do as it pleased.
Russian commentators and foreign policy-makers linked the question of their own status as a great power to Moscow’s ability to stop the USA. When this failed, they saw it as proof of their country’s de facto insignificance.
When the war began and America’s bombs rained down on Baghdad, Putin stepped before the Russian cameras. He declared that Washington’s actions were unjustifiable and unnecessary – overall, an attack against the existing system of international security.
“If we allow international law to be replaced by the power of the fist, in which the stronger side is always right, does whatever it pleases and is not restricted in the means it uses to achieve its goals, then a fundamental principle of international law, the inviolability of sovereign states, is called into question.” [52]
The Iraq war became one of the greatest disputes of the political system after the Cold War. Even in alliance with other strong powers such as Germany, France, and Turkey, Russia could not stay the USA’s hand and deter it from its aggression.
The USA demonstrated its power on the world stage. It subjugated – against the resistance of almost every other significant state – a medium-sized country thousands of kilometers away within a matter of days. The recklessness with which Washington employed this power shook the world order. Not only in Moscow, but in all the capitals of the world, alarm bells rang.
And yet Moscow had been rhetorically even more closely aligned with America in its fight against Islamist terrorism than some European allies. But with the invasion of Iraq, this closeness waned and poisoned the climate between the two nuclear powers in the long term.
