Bush And Putin: The Strange “Romance”?

Cathy Young, writing in Reason Magazine, asks:”Why is the president so kind to Vladimir Putin?”:

In June 2001, when George W. Bush held his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, he famously declared that he had “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul,” in which he evidently saw only good things untainted by years of KGB service. This beginning of a beautiful friendship was reportedly aided by Putin’s touching story of a cross which he received from his mother and which miraculously survived a fire at his summer cottage. (As one of Russia’s surviving liberal commentators, Yulia Latynina, has noted, if Bush had belonged to a different faith Putin would no doubt have shared an equally touching tale about “a piece of advice given by a wise rabbi.”)

In the six years since then, much has happened in Russia: first and foremost, a steady and brutal rollback of the freedoms gained since the start of glasnost in the late 1980s. Independent television has been obliterated; most of radio and the print press have been muzzled as well. The multiparty system has become an unfunny joke. Vocal critics of Putin have ended up in prison and, in several notorious cases, suspiciously dead. What’s more, Russia, an ostensible ally in the War on Terror, has used this alliance mostly to justify its military’s atrocities in Chechnya while refusing to back the U.S. on a wide range of foreign policy issues (mostly notably on sanctions against Iran). Anti-American hysteria has been rampant in the servile Russian press. In his speech last May commemorating Russia’s victory over Germany, Putin transparently suggested that the United States was seeking world domination in the same manner as the Third Reich.

Meanwhile, the beautiful friendship endures.

There’s a lot more so read it all.