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By Novosti Political Commentator Vladimir Simonov

September 13, 2005

Original Article (English)

MOSCOW: Vladimir Putin and George Bush will meet in Washington on September 16, but they will be not the same men who stood side-by-side in Red Square in May watching a parade held to celebrate the 60th anniversary of VE-Day, or who signed the G8 anti-terrorist declaration at Gleneagles in July.

Bush Susceptible to Putin's Reason?

In the two months since their last meeting, two events have changed the presidents’ personal and political standing, both in the eyes of their compatriots and the international community. One was Hurricane Katrina, which has claimed thousands of lives in the United States, and the other was the political tornado in Ukraine.

Katrina razed New Orleans and several other cities in the southern U.S., leaving thousands homeless, unemployed and without hope. It also undermined the ideological foundations of the United States as the world's only superpower and height of modern civilization.

It showed that the U.S. administration is unable to wage two wars simultaneously, one to export American democracy and the other to fulfill its constitutional duty of ensuring public safety. The geopolitical claims of the Bush administration have clashed with its duty to the homeland.

New Orleans would not have become a giant dead lake if spending on the Iraqi campaign hadn’t forced Washington to cut its hurricane protection allocations for southeastern Louisiana.

Local authorities had only received $10.6 million from the federal treasury, rather than the $60 million they had asked for. Four thousand National Guardsmen from Mississippi and 3,000 from Louisiana could have been dispatched to the affected area to evacuate people and stop looters, but they are in Iraq.

Scenes from Bombing on Baghdad on Wednesday in Which At Least 81 People Were Killed, 162 Wounded.

—BBC VIDEO NEWS: Bomb Goes Off Amid Laborers in Shiite Area of Baghdad, September 13, 00:00:51

The U.S. looks like a giant with feet of clay, with one foot planted in New Orleans and the other in Baghdad. Furious demonstrations at the White House and the precipitous dive in Bush's public approval ratings to 39% clearly shows who Americans blame for the belated reaction to the catastrophe and for the generally incompetent management of the crisis.

Putin, who had been an outspoken opponent of the Iraqi war, will not say to Bush "I told you so" at their Washington meeting. The Russian president, who has been known to frequent the church, probably saw Katrina as a sign that notions of power are fleeting against nature and Providence. "I am looking at it and cannot believe what I see," Putin remarked to a U.S. reporter of Katrina. "We are all vulnerable and should help one another."

I assume that Putin would like to see Bush altered by Katrina, pursuing a less arrogant foreign policy and more prepared to listen to the collective reasoning of the international community. America, which nature has brought down from its rostra as global lecturer, might now show more understanding for the problems of other countries, most notably Russia's traditional interests in former Soviet territory.

The most nettlesome issue between Moscow and Washington is their respective views of political change in the former Soviet states. The U.S. administration tends to see "color revolutions" as the triumph of democracy over corrupt regimes. But the Russian leadership sees in these pseudo-revolutions as anti-constitutional coups planned to redistribute property and infected with the virus of corruption.

Putin has repeatedly denounced attempts at enforced democratization in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, warning of a threat to their stability. The recent acute political crisis in Ukraine strengthens the Russian president's argument.

Yuliya Tymoshenko

—BBC VIDEO NEWS: 'My Sacking Unfair',
September 10, 00:01:25

President Viktor Yushchenko

—BBC VIDEO NEWS: Yushchenko Explains
Sackings, September 10, 00:02:03

By firing the government of [Prime Minister] Yuliya Tymoshenko, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has admitted to the failure of "orange" ideas. It has become clear that the new Ukrainian leadership was not a tightly knit group of idealists and patriots, as the people in Kiev's Independence Square had thought them to be, but a loose group of politicians with conflicting ideological and business interests. They were united by a desire to satisfy their political ambitions and, as Tymoshenko said, "to steal from the country."

Yushchenko assured Bush in a telephone conversation last Saturday that Kiev "will remain committed to its pro-Western policies," despite the change in government. Unfortunately for the West, Yushchenko has very few allies left to help him prove this commitment.

Tymoshenko said live on television the day before: By firing her, Yushchenko had "in effect destroyed [their] political alliance and the future of the country."

The "orange revolution" has brought Ukraine neither stability nor the promised quality of life improvements. The West, which financed the revolution, Russia, which criticized it, and the Ukrainian people, who have become its victims, have not gained a thing, other than an ineffective regime  no less corrupt than the one it brought down eight months ago. After all, a street revolt is not an election.

When the two presidents discuss the issue at their Friday summit, George Bush may listen more closely to Vladimir Putin's opinion that "color revolutions" are not the road to stability in post-Soviet territory, which, after all, is what both Russia and the West need.