However we were indeed the first ( worldwide) to go public with the fact that it happened at Annapolis and that our assessment was confirmed today by no other than Prime Minister Ehud Olmert himself. He publicly confirmed (but only today) that; the report's findings were brought up during his meetings with Washington officials soon after the Middle East Peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland last week. Also Defense Minister Ehud Barak independently confirmed the same today; that he was familiar with the report that had been shown by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates during the Annapolis peace summit last week. Olmert however during the same meeting where he publicly made the former admission, said at the opening of a meeting with the Italian deputy prime minister that the report only emphasizes and strengthens the need for the international community to tighten sanctions on Iran so that it will not be able to produce nuclear weapons, so that is short is the Israeli Gov. stand on the issue of making the report public.
In Paris since the NIE was released, there was no shock, no surprise, and the French Foreign Ministry has only intensified its calls for more sanctions. If anything, only one change has taken place: In their communications, the French now sound just a bit more pleased with themselves.
The same likely cannot be said for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany is the European power that does the most business with Iran. (Germany exported some $4 billion in goods there in 2006.) Without a tougher line from Germany, a fractured European position likely would not have been sufficient enough to shape the Iranian position. It was Sarkozy who played the critical role in convincing Merkel to cave, and the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon was the keystone of that argument.
The odds are that everything will eventually work out. A meaningful U.S.-Iranian understanding would allow Iran's trade with the outside world - especially Germany - to surge anew. But that is likely to only partially remove the bad taste in Merkel's mouth.
As for Russia, for example today Iran opened a consulate in the Russian region of Tatarstan as part of a network of deals to show the world that Iran cannot be easily isolated. The consulate also will be responsible for seeing to Iranian business in the regions of Bashkortostan, Komi, Mari El, Udmurt, Chuvash, Kirov, Orenburg, Perm, Samara, Sverdlovsk, Ulyanovsk and Chelyabinsk. The only other foreign country with a consulate in Tatarstan is Turkey (Tatars are an ethnicity of Turkic extraction).
The Russian Federation has two belts of Muslim populations. The first and better known is in the northern Caucasus and includes such regions as Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. The second runs along the western side of the Ural Mountains. If the Russian-Iranian agreement is implemented, Tehran will have a diplomatic toehold throughout the latter.
The deal is the outgrowth of Iranian-Russian negotiations that have taken place over the past year and were only finalized in the last week. However, there has been a sea change in Iranian-U.S. relations in that same week. In the aftermath of the Dec. 3 National Intelligence Estimate release, Russia fears that this will free up the United States to pay more attention to Russian activities. But it also frees up someone else.
Iran and Russia have far more bad historical blood between them than do Iran and the United States. Indeed, the last country to occupy Iran was the Soviet Union. The leading reasons the two have gotten along in recent years is that since the Soviet breakup they no longer share a direct land border, they are both concerned with issues closer to home, and both have concerns with the United States. That last bit could be changing, quickly, and the idea of a Russian-Iranian partnership is neither natural nor likely to stand the test of time.
What the Kremlin saw as a nice touch to a broad constellation of ripening relations last week suddenly has become a potential problem. The Russians are a bit touchy about allowing other states to have any sort of official presence in Russia, doubly so outside of the core cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and triply so in any region in which there is a strong minority presence.
And this Muslim belt is in many ways even more important. It separates the portions of Russia that are nearly purely ethnically Russian from sparsely populated Siberia. Specifically, all Russian transport networks, road, rail and pipeline, that link the ethnically Russian areas to Siberia pass through Tatarstan. If this region were to break away, Russia's grip on Siberia's mineral riches would fall limp.
Tatarstan is one of the major economic engines for all of Russia, because of its developed oil sector and status as a center of mechanical engineering, among other things, Tatarstan presides over the middle Volga region and sits between Moscow and the Urals, the main base of Russian heavy industry. Together with Bashkortostan, Tatarstan controls Russia's longest strategic transportation corridor from its eastern borders to Western Europe. If Tatarstan is cut off from Russia, little oil and few trains and trucks would be able to make it from Russia's Far East and Siberia to Europe.
Tatars also are the most politically active and influential ethnic minority in Russia; only 23 percent of them live in Tatarstan, while others are in Moscow and other important centers. Many have commanded top positions in Russian politics, economics and security services. Tatar oligarchs are second - though a distant second - only to Jewish oligarchs among Russia's elite. The Tatar lobby in the Kremlin and Tatar mafias in Moscow and the Tatar capital of Kazan' are among the strongest in the country. Tatarstan's current privileges as a republic within the Russian Federation are the highest and closest to independence.
Separatism and, to a lesser but still important extent, Islamism, have developed strongly among Tatars since perestroika. Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev is a moderate nationalist - Russian President Vladimir Putin does not dare replace him, despite their political struggle over Tatarstan's quiet drifting away from Moscow, because there are forces in Tatarstan more radical than Shaimiev. Those forces, which are preparing to push for full independence, make Tatarstan appear ripe to become the next big stage for anti-Kremlin protests.
Yakutia, currently called Sakha-Yakutia Republic, is Russia's biggest region and occupies one-fifth of the total territory of Russia, namely a huge chunk of Eastern Siberia. It is Russia's "gold mine" and also very rich in diamonds. If it breaks away from Russia, Yakutia would shut out Russia's northwest - Chukotka, Kamchatka and other areas - from the rest of the country, leaving the isolated areas at the mercy of the United States (Alaska borders this region via the Bering Strait).
Yakutia saw violent anti-Russian separatist demonstrations under former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, with ethnic Russians killed on the streets of Yakutsk, the republic's capital, in the late 1980s. The separatist movement is still very much alive there, and Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have reached Yakutia and are actively trying to unite the opposition, Yakut government sources say.
The frequency of demonstrations in the Russian Federation's nonethnic Russian areas has steadily increased in recent months. Demonstrators in Ingushetia periodically demand the return of the disputed Prigorodny District from North Ossetia, an issue which has led to protests against Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a close friend of Putin. Protesters in Karachay-Cherkessia in October 2004 stormed the office of their President Mustafa Batdyev. North Ossetia has seen protests to call for the resignation of President Alexander Dzasokhov, who the public blames for inaction during the Beslan school crisis in September 2004.
These regions already have some regional autonomy and would have fewer steps to take to break from Moscow than ethnic Russian areas where displeasure with the Kremlin's policies and some desire for autonomy also is growing. Moscow's influence among non-Russian republics is weaker than elsewhere in Russia, because many locals in non-Russian regions feel more bound to their local ethnic and religious groups than to Moscow. It makes sense, then, that "revolutions" under a pro-Western banner are starting in Russia's ethnic minority areas where central control already is weak - the goal is to hit Russia in its weakest spots so the "revolutions" have a better chance of success.
Clearly, momentum is building to shift regional power away from the Kremlin. Protesters are emboldened by the success of the recent popular "revolutions" in nearby FSU republics. Furthermore, protesters no longer fear reprisals by the Russian government, because Moscow's response to recent demonstrations has been docile, with no arrests or harsh penalties for opposition leaders.
Opposition groups also see support from abroad. U.S. President George W. Bush promotes democratic reform around the world to advance his administration's goals for the United States, and Washington has supported oppositions and immediately recognized the new governments instituted after "revolutions" in the FSU. Western NGOs such as the Freedom House and Soros Foundation affiliates help opposition forces with planning, organize seminars on how to lead protests and quickly train activists, assist with printing opposition publications and give some financial support.
U.S. Protestant missionaries, intentionally or not, though Russian authorities suspect the former, also play an important role in helping non-Russian ethnic regions break away from Moscow. It is telling that newly converted local Protestants have become opposition activists in those regions. Some Bashkir evangelical converts said many hundreds of them participate in and even spearhead the "revolution" there. This is a very high number, given that there are roughly 8,000 known converts there. Several hundred activists from the evangelical community is quite significant, given that in Kyrgyzstan, for example, it took only 2,000 to 3,000 demonstrators to break into and occupy the central government offices, de facto displacing the old regime.
By encouraging "revolutions" in Russia's ethnic minority areas, the Bush administration - and, to an extent, Europe - is following the footsteps of all other powers that have tried to weaken Russia. The British Empire gave money, arms and military instructors to the Caucasian and Central Asian tribes rebelling within the Russian Czarist Empire in the 19th century. The entente did the same for non-Russian nationalist movements during the October Revolution and in the 1920s, hoping that ethnic minority areas would break away from Soviet Russia. Adolf Hitler's Germany formed legions of many thousands of nonethnic Russians unhappy with Moscow's rule during its invasion of the Soviet Union.
The opposition forces preparing "revolutions" in nonethnic Russian areas are composed of different forces, ranging from pro-Western liberals to anti-Russian nationalists (both moderate and radical), to Islamists (again, both moderate and radical) and crime syndicates. Though their end goals are different, these groups have made concerted and thus far successful attempts at uniting in anti-Kremlin movements. Moderate nationalist opposition sources in Tatarstan say the U.S. NGO experts working in that region have made the call for unification the main point every time they talk to opposition activists.
Because these various groups will try to use the "revolutions" to their own ends while cooperating with others in the process, it seems some successes in these regional movements are possible - but there also is uncertainty about what forces will eventually benefit.
For the time being, it seems pro-Western liberal forces are taking the lead in Russia's "revolutionary" movements. This is because the other groups believe they can go along with the liberal-led, Western-encouraged movements for now, and when the revolution ends, if their goals are met, for example, if the nationalists or moderate Islamists end up in charge of an independent state - such a state would be better off being aligned with the West, where it can enjoy Washington's support, rather than taking what support might be available from Russia and other neighbors. Indeed, the current openly pro-Western regimes in Ukraine and Georgia are governed in part by hardcore nationalists, who often outrank pro-Western liberals.
The demonstrations have yet to result in a substantial shift in authority in the republics, but the potential is quickly growing. So far, Russia's conciliatory responses have further encouraged the opposition. It is clear that the destabilizing force of "revolutions" is entering Russia proper, and unless Moscow moves quickly to deal with these well-organized, Western-supported and increasing protests, Russia could start seeing its territory slip away, piece by piece.
This is not to say that the Iranians have any grand scheme to start an Islamic revolution in Russia's Muslim regions at present. Iran's launching of such a grandiose plan would face myriad problems, not the least of which is that most of Russia's Muslims are Sunni and Turkic, not Shiite and Persian. However, if one were to start a revolution aimed at destroying Russia as a state, this is where it would do the most damage. And a Russia cognizant of such threats is likely already regretting allowing this consulate to be established.
But back to the Dec. 3 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE); Israel is nervous, Syria senses opportunity and Russia in contrast to before, now is quietly terrified.
Plus then there
is China currently
a friend of Iran because of the formers
huge energy needs.
