A New Sense Of Putin's Soul

A New Sense Of Putin's Soul

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 14, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Crisis In Georgia: Russia's invasion of Georgia is just the latest example of Moscow's aggressive intentions. From its support of Iran's nuclear programs to opposition to missile defense, we should have seen it coming.

It seems the defeat of the Soviet Union was not the end of history after all. Like Germany during the 1930s, Russia licked its wounds, wallowed in self-pity and plotted how to get even.

While America was busy with the war on Islamic terror, Russia bided its time, solidified power at home and used its energy resources to hold its neighbors hostage while it rebuilt its war machine.

Look in his eyes now says USSR.
In June 2001, a hopeful President Bush, unaware that Sept. 11 would unravel the kinder, gentler world his father spoke of, met with Vladimir Putin.

"I looked the man in the eye," he said of Putin afterward. "I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy, and we had a very good dialogue . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul."

Turns out the man doesn't have one.

At that moment the former KGB colonel already was plotting the reacquisition of the lost provinces of the evil empire.

In his annual address to parliament in 2005, Putin made the grotesque claim that the "demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest political catastrophe of the century," demonstrating a nostalgia for what he considers the good old days that explained his decision to reinstate the old Soviet national anthem and military flag.

When Bush observed the 60th anniversary of VE Day with Putin in Moscow, the Russian leader refused to acknowledge, much less apologize, for Soviet complicity in making World War II happen in the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

Putin also maintains the fiction that Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia "invited" the Soviets in, just as he offers a new fiction that Russia was merely responding to Georgian aggression in South Ossetia.

"Stalin was a tyrant whom many call a criminal," Putin says, "but he wasn't a Nazi." Oh.

These are words to ponder as Russian tanks roll toward Gori, birthplace of Stalin, Putin's hero.

The Russia of Putin has been the No. 1 supplier of weapons to America's enemies.

In December 2005, Russia announced it would send Iran $700 million worth of TOR-M1 (SA-15) short-range surface-to-air missiles.

They will be part of a national air defense system designed to protect Iranian facilities feverishly working on a nuclear weapon to use against Israel. Moscow has supplied the fuel for the nuclear reactor Iran has built at Bushehr.

Putin's Russia also has resumed the long-range strategic bomber patrols that were common during the Cold War, but which disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union — a response to U.S. missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Russia's war games have included these bombers off France and Spain. They have buzzed U.S. aircraft carriers and violated Japanese air space. Putin has even threatened to fly supersonic TU-160 Blackjack bombers to Cuba.

After all this provocation, the U.S. is responding.

President Bush on Thursday repeated his support for a "sovereign, free Georgia and its territorial integrity." Also Thursday, the U.S. and Poland agreed to set up a battery of U.S. missiles on Polish soil and signed a "mutual commitment" to come to each other's aid in case of an attack. Meanwhile, the U.S. is sending medical and other aid to Georgia and has warned Russia not to interfere.

John McCain, who nominated Georgia's beleaguered president, Mikheil Saakashvilli, for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, says of Putin: "I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B." McCain had urged the U.S. to boycott the G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2006. In retrospect, we should have.

"NATO's decision to withhold a membership action plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia," McCain told reporters on Monday, "and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision."

So do we. Maybe, as columnist Charles Krauthammer has suggested, we need to remind Moscow what American-supplied Stinger missiles did to their occupation of Afghanistan. Perhaps the next C-117 flight into Tbilisi should carry more than blankets.



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