Russia's back, and it will kick your ass

Posted by Jan Frel at 12:59 PM on July 13, 2006.

It's G-8 time, and Russia is host. Couldn't come at a better time for Russia, really, as $78-a-barrel oil has billions pouring in its coffers. That and the announcement that it will be backing a $7 billion gas pipeline project going from Iran to Pakistan and India.

As Mark Ames and later Stephen Cohen illustrated in their essays overviewing U.S. foreign policy toward Russia in the Bush era, Dick Cheney and the Houston boys had a big plot to contain Russia and steal away its old territories, and while it worked for a time, those days are over. All of those colored Revolutions in the former Soviet Republics are practically meaningless at this point.

The eXile's latest editorial on the appearance of Russian forces in Iraq sums up the new state of things, and where we can expect them to go, channeling Joe Pesci:

Russia is going to come in like a white knight, like a stern yet effect parent, and clean up li'l America's mess in the sandbox known as Iraq. Because as the only responsible adults left in the neighborhood, Russia simply has no other choice...

While Americans approach the Iraq quagmire like good hard-working schoolboys, trying to solve problems with teacher-pleasing complicated coalition-building schemes and military feints, advances, and PR, the Russians have proven that by behaving like an adult and sticking to good' ol' fashioned killing or disappearing half the population, you can solve these kinds of problems.

You don't hear much about Chechnya these days, do you? Not the way you hear about Iraq, not even close. That's because out of a prewar population of 1.3 million, today Chechnya only has about 300,000 people left. That's just the number to the right of the dot in 1.3. If I was one of the guys on the right side of that decimal, I'd be pretty quite too, for a long, long time.

"Hey, what about human rights?" we can hear you squeal.

That's an excellent point and a fine question. To which Russia is ready to answer with its own question: "What about your fucking gas, huh? Do you still want it? Huh?"

Then the West'll go, "No, wait-wait-wait, we didn't -- we just meant, you know, we're concerned, but it's not like, heh-heh, you know?"

"No, we don't know," says Russia. Then Russia gets all Joe Pesci like and goes, "You said 'human rights.' You said it, you motherfucker. What the fuck is so human rights-y about your country without natural gas, huh? What the fuck, please enlighten me, you fuck! I've got my finger on the fucking off switch at Transneft. Just bleat one more fucking time, you fuck, and I swear I'll turn it off!"

"Yeah, yeah, we're done, we swear!"

"Good, now get the fuck out of my face. You motherfucking mutt."

And with that, the Russian Special Forces will enter Iraq. And the Americans will step aside with all their little "coalition" playfriends. And when the Russians are through cleaning up the mess, and they drive America home in its stationwagon back from occupation practice, we guarantee that in the new Russia-controlled occupied-Iraq, every Iraqi who survives will be a very light sleeper for the rest of his or her life.

That's the key to building consensus and democracy. Turning the population into light sleepers. It worked in Chechnya. It'll work again in Iraq.

Putin is an accomplished chess player. Accusations of heavy-handedness -- on civil liberties and on energy policy -- aside, the Kremlin does not need a confrontation with the "colonialist" West (the qualification is Putin's). What it needs is to find the best use for the massive financial flows that are pouring over Russia. The Russian weekly Vlast identifies "a new Russophobia in the West, hypocrite and erroneous". The Russian response is to challenge the West to accommodate to its own terms. The Kremlin calls its own internal experiment "sovereign democracy". As the Kommersant daily put it, "the West must answer to a series of ultimatums posed by Russia, including its refusal of European rules on the energy market, it particular position regarding Iran and the assurance of non-intervention on Russian internal affairs."

Putin's message to the G8 is loud and clear: we're back. And this Gazprom nation, also reveling on oil at $75 a barrel, and rising, is doing things its own way -- like exterminating, with perfect timing, public enemy number one, Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, or banishing homeless people, street vendors, intellectuals and opposition voices from St Petersburg ahead of the G8 summit. There's virtually nothing the West can do about it. Russia is not struggling to be part of "the West" anymore; it has evolved its own system, and not unlike the Middle Kingdom, at the center of the system lies the Kremlin.

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.