Cold War II? Try Pervaya Holodnaya Voyna.

The Washington Post diplomatic correspondent, Robin Wright, who has covered the Middle East for the Post for a number of years and published one of a slew of books on Iran after September 11, wrote an interesting piece for the Post comparing US efforts to prevent the formation of a "shiite crescent" in the Middle East to a second Cold War or "Cold War II", as she calls it. While I generally agree with Wright's analysis, including the thesis of her '01 book, "The Last Great Revolution", in which she argues the Iranian Revolution was a genuine people's revolution that emanated from popular discontent with the US-backed regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, I fault her for failing to link the greater political divides in the Middle East to the never ending story of the first Cold War.

The Soviet Union may no longer be the puppeteer's hand in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, or Egypt, but the puppet show goes on, with much of US policy in the Middle East still playing to an absent USSR (see recent announcement of US weapons deal to Gulf States as reported by Wright). It's no coincidence, as Wright correctly points out in her editorial piece, that Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates were some of the foremost experts on the issue of Soviet containment and are now confronting a similar issue of Islamic containment after fundamentalist Islam came to fill a void in the Middle East and Southwest Asia left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor is it a coincidence that most of Iran's nuclear technology and materials, the motley array of munitions used in IEDs as well as the abundant supply of Avtomat Kalashnikovas on the streets of Baghdad, and the Syrian weapons used to "contain" certain Lebanese politicians all have their origin to the north in a land much closer and dearer to many Arabs and Persians who have painful memories of British, American, and Eastern European colonialism and at one time perceived the Soviet Union as the only true liberator from or counterweight to foreign Judeo-Christian elements. (Of course, those old enough to remember the Soviet Union's role in shaping the Middle East and think fondly of it are invariably of the Arab/Persian nationalist variety, which brought the likes of Saddam Hussein, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Ayatollah Khomeini to power in the first place, so I have a hard time understanding why these same individuals judge the "foreign occupiers" or "crusaders" so harshly when they themselves could find no workable alternative to colonialism.)

It bears repeating that the moment at which the Cold War began can be traced to Stalin's initial refusal to remove Soviet troops from Tabriz in the Soviet sector of Iran at the conclusion of World War II. (Iran had been effectively divided between the Soviet Union and the United States during WWII with the US controlling the southern portion and the Soviet Union controlling the northern.) Stalin stood fast until Roosevelt pressed him on the matter at Yalta. Therefore, I feel it's fair to say that the original and so far only Cold War began in the Middle East. I also believe that people are likely to look back at current events in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, and agree to some extent that the Cold War ended where it began. To say that the Cold War is over is simply not true and verges on the Reaganism-cum-Bushism "Evil Empire" turned "Axis of Evil" in terms of the ease at which Americans fall victim to believing a label that derives its veracity mainly from that same ease.

If one doubts this claim, consider that almost all the current crop of policymakers at the US Departments of State and Defense and in the Kremlin, including Mr. Putin himself, were trained to think and operate using Cold War paradigms, whether that be Iran and Iraq in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia and Poland in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Georgia in the Caucasus, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, Pakistan and India in South Asia, or China and North Korea in East Asia. One need look no further for proof of this continuity of Cold War thinking than the State Department's recent announcement to reclassify Central Asia as a part of South Asia, in an attempt to reorient US foreign policy in that part of the world away from Russia and more toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, even though the overwhelming majority of trade between Central Asia and the outside world is with the two greatest evil empires of them all -- Russia and China (see recent press conference by Richard Boucher of State).

The fact that the US wants to call a horse anything but a horse is extremely troubling and an indication that history could be repeating itself, much like a similar problem the US faced a few years earlier in stating that "no corroborated evidence of weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq should imply "no weapons of mass destruction". In my mind, the real threat for Washington policymakers here is not so much Iran, which is economically and militarily the weakest it has ever been in modern history, even with oil prices at all-time highs, but rather it's the possibility that the quiet and patient superpowers, mainly Russia and China, might see Iran and the current chaos in the Middle East as their golden opportunity to revive latent but still ongoing Cold War proxy battles to secure additional energy supplies or even to inflict additional harm upon a politically-weak and militarily-stretched United States. Perhaps this would not occur anytime soon, but if the United States were to minimize its political and military exposure in the Middle East as some currently are suggesting in Washington, whether that be in Iraq or the West Bank, I think there would be a significant chance of Russia trying to reacquire some of its former prestige as a regime-shaping power in the Middle East or China trying to become what the Soviet Union once represented to the region.

That said, there is a strong claim that the Russians or Chinese could do no worse at organizing a loose confederation of tribes and ethnicities in the Middle East and fueling Arab/Persian nationalism in the process than the United States and British governments have done throughout the last century. (The obvious counterpoint: it was the Soviet Union and its repressive policies toward Ashkhenazi Jews that were primarily responsible for fueling the spread of Zionism in the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights, which in turn fueled groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and which then gave the Soviet Union a new pretext for intervening in the region.) Nothwithstanding the last century in the Middle East, the general principle is one shouldn't give guns to people who haven't learned how to organize themselves according to the rules and usages of a human language. The United States, Russia, and China have all repeatedly offended this principle throughout the Middle East, and it scares me a great deal to look at the first Gulf War and know that even in the midst of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet military had returned to Iraq to assist Saddam Hussein in reconstituting the Iraqi military, including its air force (this particular period in Iraqi history, of course, coincided with the mass killings of Kurds and Shiites numbering in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands).

So, in response to Ms. Wright -- it's too early to talk of a Cold War II. The United States, Russia, and China are still walking backwards through Cold War I. Not until the Big Three reverse their direction and work toward certain common political and military ends in the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia will we see the undoing of the final vestiges of Cold War I.

Dobro Pozhalovat' / Yaxshi Gelin / Mobrdzandit / Xub bioyid

Welcome to my new blog. Although I haven't been in the business of self-promotion since my high school days when admission to the ivy league meant the difference between genius and loser to my cohort of overachievers looking for their own small piece of self-affirmation, I too am susceptible to herd/mob behavior like any irrational human being. At last, I have also felt the irresistible pull to join the mass of self-proclaimed experts laying siege to the web before they could possibly deprive me of the small piece of self-affirmation I never received in being denied admission to every east coast school to which I applied. (From this point on, I promise not to use another adjective with the prefix "self".)

My personal insecurities notwithstanding, I believe that my own life experiences and the insights I draw from these are of relative insignificance to the overwhelming majority of humanity. Unfortunately, with regard to my fellow Americans, I cannot say the same, especially in light of the current abyssmal state of our foreign affairs. Therefore, I feel I have a citizen's duty to educate not only the masses in my own homestate of Ohio, who shop at Walmart, drive F150s, and drink MGD, but also every Shiraz-imbibing Slavicist, Arabicist, and Turkologist out there who holds a high position in some reputable academic department in one of those universities I once dreamed of attending.

And, what common knowledge are these two disparate groups lacking that I might possess, you ask? It is my belief that I know more about certain realities that would be evident to anyone who has spent any small amount of time in the southern republics of the former Soviet Union. Unfortunately, most Americans have never stepped foot in such countries as Georgia and Uzbekistan, yet the democratic processes behind US foreign policy would seem to suggest they have. What's even worse, is that most red and blue-state voters alike fail to see why they should have to know anything about the former Soviet Union given that most of the threats to their livelihoods and very lives appear to emanate from the Middle East these days. To them, it makes no difference if they think of the Persian-looking Stalin as Russian or the Georgian language as a dialect of the Russian one, no matter how dumb this may make them appear to an ethnic Russian or Georgian.

Granted, this is not entirely my compatriots' fault that they lack any understanding of what lies within Reagan's "Evil Empire"; it is the fault of uninformed and often ill-advised policymakers who were elected, in part, as a natural consequence of American tolerance of our general state of ignorance concerning what lies beyond our vast borders. These policymakers themselves had spent little if any time in the former Soviet Union for fear of being labeled a "red" by their political competitors in much the same manner that Soviets were labeled "vrag trudyashihsya" during Stalin's purges. Consequently, fear became the driving force of US foreign policy during the Cold War, as it arguably has become again in relation to Muslim peoples in the United States and abroad.

Today, in the United States, we debate endlessly about our next plan of attack or lack of a plan in Iraq, yet in the midst of all this debate, the parallels to the Cold War are once again painfully evident, just as they were when we, as a country, returned to Afghanistan in 2001 after a decade-long hiatus. For one, we continue to make world-transforming decisions affecting groups of people who are unable to participate in our political process, while all the same we lack a command of the necessary social facts to make those decisions. For example, how many Americans realize that there are as many Muslims in Uzbekistan as Iraq and that there are more Mulsims in Russia than in all of Uzbekistan? How many Americans truly realize that the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whether intentionally or not, as opposed to the penniless Hamas, are the number one propagators of Islamic radicalism, and yet they remain two of the United States' closest allies still?

Before I am accused of casting the United States as the sole victim of the Cold War, I should pose the question of why Sunni Arabs today cite the works of a Tajik by the name of Al-Bukhari yet kill Shiites who represent the same lands from which Al-Bukhari hailed. I should pose the additional questions of why Georgians see Georgia as a traditionally Georgian Orthodox land when nearly one fifth of the population is not and has never been, and why mullahs in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan can no longer read arabic let alone the perso-arabic script used to read and write their very indigenous languagues only four generations ago. Finally, why is it that Russian nationalists such as Zhirinovsky speak of "rossiya dlya russkih" when they fondly use modern Persian words, such as "chemodan" or "divan" or Turkish words such as "stakan" and "karandash" or Arabic words such as "magazin" or "neft'" in their daily speech?

These are some of the contradictions or, better yet, connections, I hope to bring to light in this blog in the near future. While my own memory of the Cold War is limited being born a decade before the "razpad", I have seen much of the remnants of that time from my brief stays in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and I would like to believe that I have a more accurate and balanced conception of what people who remember that time on both sides of the dividing line say about the good and the bad. My only hope is that I might bridge the gaps in memory and understanding, not only between generations of Americans and former Soviets, but between groups of people that historically have had political or cultural connections but were separated and redefined as a result of militarily powerful outsiders who believed they knew better than the individual what one's dreams and desires should be.

The current Iraq war is a continuation of this circular story. Moreover, let us not forget that many countries in the near vicinity of Iraq have known what Iraqis and Americans are now experiencing and that there are many other countries in the world that struggle with how best to balance the preferences of the individual against the collective and the demands of tradition against those of justice. Americans should not have a monopoly on how to balance these competing preferences, but we should have a say, and when we speak, we should at least have a command of certain social facts. I don't seek to change the preferences of Americans with this blog. I simply desire to educate them about the many types of people in the former Soviet Union they have never met yet whose lives they influence almost daily through the gifting of American tax dollars and guns almost as an afterthought.

I look forward to any and all comments.