corrente

Early on in his administration, Bush met with Premier Putin, eyeball to eyeball, each to take the measure of the other. What Bush saw in Putin's eyes was a fundamentally good heart. That vibrant connection, two good hearts at the helm of vast and powerful countries, survived even Russia's apostasy on Iraq.

The first blush of romance may have warn off, but Putin still sees something kindred in George W.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in comments sure to help President Bush, declared Friday that Russia knew Iraq's Saddam Hussein had planned terror attacks on U.S. soil and had warned Washington.

Putin said Russian intelligence had been told on several occasions that Saddam's special forces were preparing to attack U.S. targets inside and outside the United States.

"After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing 'terrorist acts' on the United States and beyond its borders," he told reporters.

Saddam must have been worried that President Bush might not really invade, so it made sense to him to put his fingerprints on a terrorist attack just to make sure.
Oh, and by the way, the Russians were never able to report intelligence about any specific planned attack. The lack of specifics must be why no one in the Bush administration ever mentioned this Russian intelligence. And Bush would probably have considered it pandering to a press determined to do him in to bring it up now that the 9/11 Commission has given a minimalist interpretation of what relationship there might have been between Saddam and Osama. Which is probably why Putin took it upon himself to speak up for a kindred good heart.

The Kremlin leader's comments were certain to bolster Bush, whose campaign for re-election in November is under pressure from the Iraq crisis.

The U.S. leader has been on the defensive at home for insisting -- against the findings of an independent commission -- that Saddam had links with al Qaeda, the militant group behind the 2001 airline attacks in the United States that killed 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. war on terrorism.

Putin's remarks were all the more unusual since Russia had diplomatic relations with Saddam's Iraq and sided with France and Germany in opposing the invasion.

No, he hasn't changed his mind about that opposition; Putin couldn't support the invasion because it hadn't been sufficiently respectful of international law. Perhaps what might seem an almost excessive reverence for the rule of international law is made possible by the absence of any genuine rule of law to revere within Russia. Still, we have Mr. Bush's good word that Mr. Putin has a good heart. Perhaps it's this emphasis on "goodness" that seems to have tipped Mr. Putin toward the Republican party.

It is not the first time that Putin, who has forged a strong personal bond with Bush despite opposing him diplomatically over Iraq, has come to his defense on the issue.

At a summit of G8 world industrialized powers at the U.S. resort of Sea Island last week, where he met Bush separately, Putin stepped into the U.S. campaign by chastising U.S. Democrats for attacking the Republican president on Iraq.

He said they had "no moral right" to do so since it had been the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton that had authorized the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by U.S. and NATO forces.

Early this morning, I heard a debate of sorts on CNN or MSNBC between Jamie Rubin, and a young woman from the Hoover Institute regarding this question of exactly what were the justifications for the Iraq invasion, and which ones were true. The young woman proferred the most extraordinary version of the human rights raison d'etre for the war; Saddam's link with terrorism was contained in the fact that he was a brutal dictator and commentators have continually overlooked that part of the Bush doctrine which asserts this "root causes" rationale, that from such dictatorships doth arise both terrorism and terrorists.

I have to admit that I missed that myself. Wow, we have our work cut out for us if the answer to the terroristic potential of brutal dictatorships is a policy of prophylactic invasion.

Aware as we all are that irony has been alternately banished and cheapened in the post 9/11 universe, forgive me for pointing out that Putin made his statement regarding the brutal dictatorship of Iraq and its ties to the stateless Al Queda from the capital city of Khazakhstan; you can find how human rights are doing in that ex-Soviet Republic here.