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Editor's
note: The opinions are those of the author and not of any agency
of the U. S. government.
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Russia and America have both experienced mass terrorism by Islamic
extremists — but we experienced it first." This allusion
by a Russian academic last week to the 1999 string of apartment
bombings in Moscow was more somber than accusatory. And in it, there
was also a sentiment that many Russians, and their president, seem
to share: that the time is right to use cooperation in the war on
terror to improve relations between Russia and the United States.
After so many years of clumsy and ham-fisted anti-Russian diplomacy
on the part of the Clinton administration, it is an opportunity
for a new start that the Bush administration should seize.
This chance
at a renewal of Russian-American relations came about, in part,
because of a new Russian sympathy for the Americans after September
11. Indeed, many Russians feel that they have been living for years
with the kind of fear that Americans are only now experiencing,
and there seems to be little satisfaction among them that Americans
now live with the same anxieties. Even before the Moscow bombings,
there was apprehensiveness in the Russian capital about the possible
repercussions of the civil war in Chechnya; since the 1999 bombings,
however, Muscovites in particular have been more watchful about
the odd parcel on the subway, a feeling that has returned and intensified
since the Twin Towers and Pentagon disasters. (Last week in Moscow,
police could be seen stopping bearded young men and checking their
identification. Racial profiling may not be nice, but it happens
everywhere.) Although gun-toting Chechens are no longer as visible
in the capital as they once were — I was once seated at a table
in a hotel dining room across from a group of them sporting shoulder-holstered
weapons, and was advised to leave before they drank too much —
the attacks against America have rekindled in many Muscovites the
tensions they felt at the worst moments of the Chechen events and
a subsequent, growing sense of solidarity with their former enemy,
the United States.
The scale of
the Moscow bombings two years ago did not match the carnage in New
York and Washington, but the method was similar, with bombs, triggered
in the dead of night to maximize casualties, that leveled entire
buildings filled with innocent civilians in one blow. When then-Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin promised to put paid to the terrorists (he
was reported to have used Russian gangster slang in vowing to "wipe
them out in their crappers"), his popularity, like President
Bush's now, shot through the roof, reaching unheard-of levels for
a Russian politician. Although much of Putin's later election in
2000 can be traced to his privileged position as Acting President
in the wake of Boris Yeltsin's sudden resignation, his brutal attacks
on the Chechens were perhaps the single more important issue on
which the voters supported him. At the time, many Western commentators
tut-tutted that this was little more than cynical jingoism, but
Putin's victory reflected more of an understandable craving for
stability (and revenge, to be sure) on the part of ordinary Russians
than it did any kind of slick electoral marketing.
None of this
is to excuse the undeniable excesses of Russia's Chechen campaigns.
But Russians, in turn, now ask what course America would take under
the same circumstances, knowing full well that U.S. force would
be used more judiciously, but it would be — and in their view,
should be — used nonetheless. This may be why more than
over 40 percent of Muscovites in recent polls are now more inclined
to view the United States as justified in the use of force, a sea
change from previous beliefs.
Moreover, the
September 11 attacks, and the resonance that American fears have
found among many Russians, overshadows issues like NATO expansion
that now seem almost trivial as sources of Russian-American friction.
This in turn has opened a clear opportunity to undo much of the
damage inflicted on the Russian-American relationship by the lurching
policy of the Clinton years — smiling handshakes one moment,
barely disguised insults the next — as both Moscow and Washington
find a common interest in a global defense against terror.
The Russians
have much to offer in both political and strategic terms, not the
least of which is Moscow's continued acquiescence in American and
allied movements through the states of the former Soviet Union.
If the Russian government were to object, perhaps suspecting an
attempt to use the war on terror as a pretext for placing U.S. forces
close to Russian borders, it would greatly complicate military (not
to mention diplomatic) planning. But if Russia is a partner, rather
than an observer, in this war, it will go far to allay such fears.
Furthermore, the partnership would not only provide the Western
coalition with a powerful ally, but would send a message to the
terrorists and their state sponsors alike that the civilized nations
of the world can overcome their immediate differences to attend
to the more important work of finding and exterminating murderers.
Greater cooperation
with the Russians will not solve our differences with them overnight,
but it will help to cast them in a new light. Moscow objects to
President Bush's hopes for missile defenses, to take but one example,
but a joint effort against terrorism may help to convince the Russians
(finally) that terrorists with nuclear missiles should be thwarted
just as surely as terrorists flying hijacked airplanes. At the very
least, strengthening ties with Moscow and engaging the Russian people
in a cause that is theirs as well as ours can help to lay the last
vestiges of the Cold War to rest, and to convince the terrorists
that the war they've brought upon themselves cannot be won by dividing
old enemies or new friends.
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