Russia's Vladimir Putin says West is fomenting jihadi 'blowback'

[Dino Velvet]

Interesting take from Putin.

http://news.yahoo.com/russias-vladimir-putin-says-west-fomenting-jihadi-blowback-173800021.html


Russia's Vladimir Putin says West is fomenting jihadi 'blowback'

Moscow is criticized for weak support of the Arab Spring, and for actively backing Bashir al-Assad in Syria. But the Kremlin says its policies are consistent and the West is exporting revolt.

By Fred Weir | Christian Science Monitor – Fri, Jan 25, 2013


Both Vladimir Putin (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Vladimir+Putin) and his foreign minister have lashed out at the West in recent days for pursuing what they regard as naive and incoherent Middle East (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Middle+East) policies.
The critique targets Western backing of anti-dictator rebellions in Libya (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Libya) and Syria (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Syria), which, as Mr. Putin tells it, only fuels the spreading flames of extreme Islamist insurrection, including the current war in Mali (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Mali) and last week's terrorist strike on a gas complex in Algeria (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Algeria).
"The Syrian conflict has been raging for almost two years now. Upheaval in Libya, accompanied by the uncontrolled spread of weapons, contributed to the deterioration of the situation in Mali," Mr. Putin said at a meeting with new ambassadors in the Kremlin (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/The+Kremlin) Thursday.
RECOMMENDED: Do you know anything about Russia? A quiz. (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2012/0202/Do-you-know-anything-about-Russia-A-quiz/City-I)
"The tragic consequences of these events led to a terrorist attack in Algeria which took the lives of civilians, including foreigners," he added.
"Those whom the French and Africans are fighting now in Mali are the same people who . . . our Western partners armed so that they would overthrow the Gaddafi regime," in Libya in 2011, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Sergei+Lavrov) told a news conference Wednesday.
Many in the West may be inclined to shrug off Russian criticism as the routine sniping of a government whose Mideast influence has slumped since the Arab Spring began, or the self-serving rationale of an autocratic regime that fears popular revolution and automatically backs authoritarian rulers.
But many Russian experts, including sharp critics of the Kremlin on other issues, argue that Russian leaders are being realists about the blowback that has followed Western interventions in the Muslim world.
Get our FREE 2013 Global Security Forecast now (http://csmonitorpro.com/)
They say Moscow (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Moscow) has been dealing with the threat of militant jihadists since the Soviet Union (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/U.S.S.R.)'s disastrous 1980s war in Afghanistan (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Afghanistan), and has watched as it has shown up in parts of Russia (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Russia)'s heartland. Kremlin leaders accuse the West of an enthusiasm for toppling dictators that has led, not to democracy, but to spreading mayhem and rising Islamist militancy across West Asia (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Western+Asia) and North Africa (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/North+Africa).
"Russia is on the frontier, we are in jihad territory," says Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the independent Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in Moscow.
"Our own fringes, the northern Caucasus (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0405/Russia-Islamist-network-takes-shape-as-Caucasus-hit-by-another-terrorist-attack), Central Asia (http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0719/p06s01-wosc.html), and even the central Volga region (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0419/Russia-urges-NATO-to-stay-in-Afghanistan-beyond-2014) are threatened. That's why we're very clear about who the enemy is.. . . We know this, and you would think that after 9/11 and other events that our American and European colleagues would have some clarity about it, too. Yet they always seem ready to play with fire, and to use militant jihadists against Russia and its national interests – as they did in Afghanistan, Chechnya (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Chechnya), Libya, and Syria," he adds.
Over the past decade Russia has used its UN Security Council (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/United+Nations+Security+Council) vote to oppose the US (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/United+States) invasion of Iraq (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Iraq) aimed at overthrowing dictator Saddam Hussein (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Saddam+Hussein); yet it has strongly supported NATO (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/NATO)'s anti-Taliban (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/The+Taliban) mission in Afghanistan. Last year, Putin even urged the Western allies not to leave Afghanistan (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0315/US-Russia-reset-gets-a-boost-with-Russian-offer-of-airbase) before the "job was done" and Moscow gave NATO the use of a huge airbase (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0206/Russia-Why-the-fury-over-UN-veto-on-Syria)in central Russia to help with the resupply effort to its embattled forces there.
Moscow abstained on the March 2011 Security Council resolution that authorized the use of force "to protect civilians" in Libya, and last month it actually backed another resolution empowering France (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/France) and others to intervene against Islamists threatening to overrun Mali.
On the other hand, Russia has repeatedly vetoed any resolution (http://www.csmonitor.com/%20http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0119/Why-Russia-is-willing-to-sell-arms-to-Syria) aimed at international cooperation to ease Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Bashar+Assad) from power and continues to back his regime with political support and shipments of weaponry (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0322/Medvedev-slams-Putin-s-inexcusable-Libya-crusade-comments). The UN (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/United+Nations) estimates 60,000 killed in the ongoing civil war in Syria, with some 500,000 to 600,000 displaced or categorized as refugees.
Outsiders may be forgiven for seeing Moscow's policies as a bit tangled, not to say hypocritical, but many Russian analysts argue that they have been completely consistent – with the sole exception of former President Dmitry Medvedev (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Dmitry+Medvedev)'s decision to abstain on the Libya "use of force" resolution, which was publicly slammed by then-Prime Minister Putin (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0322/Medvedev-slams-Putin-s-inexcusable-Libya-crusade-comments).
"The Libya resolution contained promises to Russia that were never delivered. Today our abstention on that vote can be clearly seen as a mistake, a symption of Medvedev's non-professionalism," says Mr. Satanovsky.
The Russians argue that they back secular goverments and stability, even where it is enforced by a dictatorship, because the alternatives are almost universally worse. They insist that Western efforts to back democratic revolution have backfired almost everywhere, and will continue to do so.
"All attempts to export revolution end badly," says Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the State Duma's international affairs committee.
"In Iraq, the Americans came in to eliminate fictitious weapons of mass destruction, and knocked out all the pillars of stability in that country. Look at the mess it's in today.... Libya was stable, Syria was stable, until revolutions aided and abetted by Western powers tore them apart. All this chaos is a gift to militant fundamentalists and no one else," he adds.
Russia's backing for the current French-led intervention in Mali is just a case of lining up against the common enemy, the jihadists, pro-Kremlin analysts say.
They point out that the government the West is propping up in Mali is a dictatorship, the result of a military coup last year that overthrew the democratic government on the eve of elections.
"We agree with the French about this. Maybe they're finally seeing the light," says Sergei Markov (http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Sergei+Markov), vice president of the Plekhanov Economic University in Moscow and a frequent adviser to President Putin in the past.
"It's an attempt to stem the damage that's a result of the misguided operation in Libya. It's against the jihadists and we support it," he adds.
"When the West is helping to destroy a stable regime, and willfully opening the gates to the radical Islamists, we oppose it. . . We wish that Russia and the West could work together on this. We are willing, but we doubt the West is ready to cooperate with us," Mr. Markov says.
"Will it have to take a few more Western ambassadors being killed by the very forces they created before they will listen to us?"

[Jamie Michelle]

Interesting take from Putin.

http://news.yahoo.com/russias-vladimir-putin-says-west-fomenting-jihadi-blowback-173800021.html

The US government is funding and supplying its CIA sic-dog al-Qaeda in order to take over Libya and Syria and to attack Iran, and this comes as any surprise?

It's not "blowback" when one funds, trains, and supplies these people. More like a mutually-beneficial exchange. The US government is putting in radical Islamists into the Middle East, in countries that were previously secular and fairly liberal (by Middle Eastern standards). In this manner, the counties thereby taken-over by the West are kept in the Stone Age while providing dirt-poor and dirt-dumb Islamists that the US intelligence agencies can recruit for boneheaded FBI-directed "attacks" upon the US in order to scare the ever-dumb US sheeple into giving up all their rights.

[fivekatz]

To a large extent Mr. Putin is right. The people of many of these countries when given free choice will opt for leadership that is hyper-religious. Now many of these leaders are no different than any other men of power, they are corrupt. Jihad becomes a wonderful cover for the leaders personal agendas.

The west is unsure how to handle the social revolutions in the region. When the boundaries are more clear the US historically has had no issue with supporting dictatorships that we have common interests with. What make situations like Libya and Syria more difficult to determine policy towards is that the existing governments have had serious conflicts with American doctrine.

The fact that the US and its government has to give any of this any serious consideration speaks volumes IMHO about the toxic nature of dependency on fossil fuel and that there are corporations with great influence and power that do not want the dependence to go away.

For his part Putin is a bad actor on the world stage IMHO. He has hung on to power when protocol called for him to pass it on. He fuels 20th Century tensions because he has no 21st Century vision for Russia,

[Stavros]

The US government is funding and supplying its CIA sic-dog al-Qaeda in order to take over Libya and Syria and to attack Iran, and this comes as any surprise?

It's not "blowback" when one funds, trains, and supplies these people. More like a mutually-beneficial exchange. The US government is putting in radical Islamists into the Middle East, in countries that were previously secular and fairly liberal (by Middle Eastern standards). In this manner, the counties thereby taken-over by the West are kept in the Stone Age while providing dirt-poor and dirt-dumb Islamists that the US intelligence agencies can recruit for boneheaded FBI-directed "attacks" upon the US in order to scare the ever-dumb US sheeple into giving up all their rights.

The ignorance from Jamie is sadly typical of this jaded 'Christianised Randian'. What used to be called 'Al-Qaeda' no longer exists, but there are franchises which claim the title, to impress impressionable young men and make claims they cannot deliver. Most of the people involved in the 9/11 attacks were neither 'dirt-poor' nor 'dirt-dumb' but graduates in engineering, architecture and bin Laden himself was a millionaire when he first went to Afghanistan. I don't know what Middle Eastern country has yet been 'taken over' by these 'radical Islamists', even if it were either Iraq or Libya, to describe them as being 'kept in the Stone Age' is bizarre not least because Libyans and Iraqis can not only read and write, but some are doctors, engineers, architects and accountants, and the ruins of the Roman Empire in Libya and the, sadly looted, antiquities of Iraq are testament to places that in fact advanced out of the stone age a few millenia ago.

[Stavros]

A more important issue is the difficulty that many people have with democracy. The Russians have a history of supporting dictatorships in the Middle East, such as Nasser and Sadat in Egypt, Asad in Syria, Saddam in Iraq and the various leaders of what once was 'People's Republic of South Yemen' -these regimes may indeed have had a secular government, have been more 'liberal' on women's rights than other Middle Eastern states (which is debatable), and boasted how in Afganistan they abolished the 'bride price', but the Russians were always more interested in the Cold War and used all of their client states in the region as part of their extended 'war' with the USA; few in the civilian populations of those countries benefited from Russian/Soviet 'assistance'.

The reason is that democracy was never an option; democracy in government can be messy, unpredictable, unstable and thus in operational terms, incompetent. The problem is that democracy is not just a form of government but also a form of society, democracy benefits ordinary people when they can organise things among themselves without being accountable to government, other than abiding by the laws passed with their consent. The history of the USSR was shaped by a belief that decision-making should be centralised, by Lenin's belief that that 'the masses' need guidance...in attempting to defend the USSR and Russia from its critics, Putin and his ministers pose 'radical Islam' as the alternative to secular dictatorship, but it is dictatorship that is the prize.

If you deprive people of their liberty, if jobs are available only to those who are members of 'the party', or the elite, if opportunities for debate are stifled, why expect democracy to emerge fully formed from the collapse of a dictatorship? Cosider that this is how the Bolsheviks gained power in Russia in 1917-1923 -the collapse of liberal institutions in Russia, which Kerensky failed to halt between February and October 1917, led to the chaos of civil war in which the Bolsheviks emerged as the most disciplined, best organised political group. The appeal was their ability to impose order on societies in chaos.
It was Trotsky, as Commissar of the Red Army in 1918 who re-recruited officers from the Tsar's army who had been sacked in 1917, begging them to help defeat the White Armies by telling them they were doing it for Russia, rather than the Communists.

Are today's Jihadi any different from the Bolsheviks and the Cuban revolutionaries in believing that 'if you don't hit it, it won't fall'? And that victory will come to those best organised who offer order out of the chaos? Ideology has nothing to do with it, and it is disingenuous for Putin to pretend that it does.