...I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul."
Whoops!
The Bush administration's failure to win Russia's consent to install U.S. missile defenses in its European backyard and a growing list of other disputes suggest that President Bush and his aides have misread the man whose "soul" Bush thought he'd divined when they first met six years ago.
[...]
Instead, fueled by record oil and natural gas prices and resentment of what he lambasted in February as Bush's "almost uncontained hyper use of force," Putin has led global opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, hosted Palestinians on the U.S. list of terrorist groups, sold anti-aircraft missiles and other arms to Iran and stymied Bush's drive to tighten U.N. sanctions on the Islamic republic for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment.
The Kremlin has steadily increased spending on defense modernization and revived symbolic long-range aerial reconnaissance patrols toward U.S. and European airspace.
[...]
Bush and his aides "grossly misjudged Putin," considering him "a good guy and one of us," said Michael McFaul of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
The former KGB officer created that illusion partly by appearing to share Bush's political and religious convictions, standard tradecraft employed by intelligence officers to recruit spies, he said.
"Putin . . . is a brilliant case officer," said Carlos Pasqual, a former senior State Department official now at The Brookings Institution, a center-left policy organization in Washington.
In other words, George got rolled by a spy.
This, of course, begs the question: What was that great Russia expert Condi Rice doing all that time? Perhaps Rice's credential are a bit, shall we say, overstated?
I spent two years as a history major in college - barely any training at all - but my entire life I've read history both broadly and deeply. One of my main areas of interest has always been Russia/Soviet Union. No one has ever described me as "brilliant" - and rightfully so - nor has anyone sung praises to my knowledge of Russia. And yet I knew that the administration was being played for a patsy by the Russian leader.
It's one of those things you tend to pick up when you study the history of this particular country.
I recall that when Rice was an obscure NSC staffer back during the Bush 41 administration and being praised as a great Sovietologist there were plenty of historians and political scientists who thought that she was a joke who achieved high positions by dint of making the right connections.
It looks like they were right.
And now the joke's on us.
---
ADDED: Condi speaks!
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Russian human rights activists on Saturday she wanted to help them build institutions to protect people from the 'arbitrary power of the state'.
[...]
"I am quite confident that your goal is to build institutions that are indigenous to Russia -- that are Russian institutions -- but that are also respectful of what we all know to be universal values," said Rice.
She said these were: "The rights of individuals to liberty and freedom, the right to worship as you please, and the right to assembly, the right to not have to deal with the arbitrary power of the state."
The proverbial inmates are running the proverbial asylum.
.
