Does Russia Need Iraq?

While the contest between President Boris Yeltsin and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov for the Russian presidency was generally treated here as an internal matter, the entire world was looking on it with great apprehension. Countries outside Russia realized that the outcome would not only deeply affect Russia's larger strategic relations with the United States and the West in general, but its indirect relations with other areas such as the Middle East.


The supporters of Zyuganov in the Middle East have expressed their dissatisfaction at the changes Moscow has made in its approach to the region these past few years. They assert that Moscow no longer has the influence it once had and that it is playing into Washington's hands, which many think is working toward eliminating Russia's influence the region and establishing hegemony there. In a word, many Russian Arab specialists are still basing their assessments of Middle East politics on an old Soviet model of confrontation.


This should come as no surprise, given that it is not easy to change old patterns of thinking. But I am not as surprised at their evaluations as at those of the Russian press. To treat problems in the Middle East as stemming from the "pernicious machinations of Washington" has almost become commonplace in the Russian media. Moreover, this is true not only of communist newspapers, but entirely serious, worthy publications.


It is remarkable how sincerely surprised young journalists are when they arrive at any Middle Eastern country for the first time. Contrary to what they have been informed, they find that neither Israel nor the United States are participating in the conflict between Egypt and Sudan, that influential Arab leaders themselves are not prepared to put an end to the isolation of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein or that most Persian Gulf countries feel that they are threatened militarily not by Washington or Tel Aviv but rather by Tehran. In a word, the problems among the Arab states and their close neighbors, Israel, Turkey and Iran, exist objectively and of themselves. Of course, it is another matter how these problems are dealt with by Moscow and Washington.


After the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party in 1991, the policies of the Yeltsin administration took the objective nature of Middle Eastern problems much more into account than previously. It can only be hoped that Yeltsin's victory at the presidential election will be a guarantee of continued policies in this direction.


The part of the Russian Foreign Ministry that remains hardline has many obstacles in the way of returning to past policies. For example, closer ties to Iran are complicated by the Arab League's recent condemnation of Iran's seizure of three islands in the Persian Gulf from the United Arab Emirates and its interference in the internal affairs of Bahrain by lending support to a Shiite revolt there. How could Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov express his moral support for Saddam Hussein, even if he truly wanted to, when Arab leaders at the all-Arab summit in Cairo last month affirmed their wish not to have any relations with the Baghdad leader? And wouldn't the Kremlin risk complicating its relations with Egypt, the leading country of the Arab world, if it carried out its recent plans to renew military cooperation with Sudan? Moreover, the "secret fondness" of Russian generals for the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi flies in the face of the recent sanctions against Tripoli by the UN Security Council.


Suppose that as a result of coalitions and a more nationalistic turn of the Kremlin, the people who occupied the top positions in the Foreign Ministry turned out not to be realists but rather hardline nationalists. Let us also assume that they carry out a more assertive policy in the Middle East by expressing sympathy for and establishing closer trade relations with radical states like Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya and others. Clearly, the result of such steps would be a sharp confrontation with the majority of Arab countries, Israel and then even the West. This is precisely what supporters of Zyuganov and ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky would like to see. Such a confrontation could only lead to a return to the predominance of the military industrial complex and the militarization of Russian society.


A passage from Zyuganov's work, "Beyond the Horizon," provides a good idea of this atmosphere of confrontation: "In the world outlook, culture and ideology of the Western world, there is an increasingly palpable influence of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish diaspora traditionally controls the financial life of the continent and through its 'own market' it has begun to have a controlling interest in the industrial-economic life of the whole of Western civilization ... In these conditions, Slavic civilization takes on particular significance in the form of the Russian empire."


Curiously, Primakov was not subject to any criticism by this leader of the "national-patriotic forces." Zyuganov even judged his first actions as foreign minister as positive. But communists praised him for reasons that were different from the democrats. Some communist newspapers, such as Pravda, expressed the hope that the new foreign minister's well-known sense of patriotism would prevail, a quality that they believe his predecessor, the "pro-Western" Andrei Kozyrev, lacked. The sense of patriotism they were speaking about involves the very same confrontational policies of Soviet times, including in the Middle East.


But during the pre-election campaign, Primakov distanced himself from such hot spots as the Middle East, as if to remove this disquieting theme from the political battle. And this is precisely how the new Russian policies in this region can remain sensible and balanced.





Alexander Shumilin, former Middle East bureau chief for Moskovskiye Novosti, is an independent journalist based in Cairo. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.