What The United States Could Learn From Ghana About Elections

In case you missed it, we had a presidential election in the US last month. After a seemingly endless campaign, President Barack Obama defeated his challenger Mitt Romney in a race that wasn't all that close – Obama won just over 50% of the vote to Romney's 47.3%. Of course this didn't stop the opposition from alleging that Obama “stole” the election: Romney himself claimed that Obama only won by promising lower-income voters undefined “free stuff”. Meanwhile, groups of Americans across the country (but primarily in the South) responded by starting petitions encouraging their respective states to secede from the Union, with the Texas petition gathering more than 100,000 signatures.

Perhaps that's why with piece on the BBC last week about reactions to another hard-fought presidential election, this time in the African nation of Ghana, stuck with me.  In Ghana, incumbent President John Mahama of the NDC party defeated opposition leader Nana Akufo-Addo of the NPP.  Even though Ghana is one of Africa's most stable democracies, the election was marked by technical glitches which caused long delays at some polling places.  This, in turn, led the NPP to allege that the election was “stolen” from them.

That's where the BBC piece comes in.  The BBC interviewed five Ghanaians, including supporters of the NPP. What's noteworthy is that rather than join in their party's call to contest the election, the NPP supporters seemed rather embarrassed by the party's stance, with both saying that the party should just accept the results of the election and one voter questioning whether he made a mistake voting for the NPP if this was the way they were going to react.  Another voter explained that the reason the NPP lost was not due to fraud, but because of the party's inability to realize their message wasn't resonating in several of the country's key swing states (and doesn't that sound like an explanation that could apply to the US Republicans as well?)

It was refreshing to see voters not blame their political party's loss on some poorly-defined notions of fraud, or call for unrest, but to accept the results of the election and to blame the loss on the shortcomings of the losing party.  Perhaps the United States could learn a thing or two from the way that Ghanaians practice democracy.

Putin Goes Soft On Pussy Riot

In a surprising turn, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a signal Thursday in London that could lead to leniency for the feminist punk protest outfit known as Pussy Riot.

If you haven't been following the Pussy Riot story, you can get caught up with this post I wrote this week for PolicyMic.  In short, the group bills themselves as a feminist punk collective; they gained national stature in Russia during the past year thanks to their rapid fire public performances of songs ripping into the Putin regime, which were then widely viewed on YouTube and other social media sites.  In February, Pussy Riot stormed into Moscow's Christ the Savior cathedral to perform a “punk prayer” where they implored the Virgin Mary to “drive Putin out!”  Two weeks later, three of Pussy Riot's members: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina, were arrested and charged with what amounts to a religious hate crime that could land them seven years in prison.

It has been widely believed that the harsh legal charges were directed from the very top, Putin himself, who took the performance, which also attacked the close links between the Putin government and Russian Orthodox Church, as a personal insult and that the prosecution of Pussy Riot has taken on the dimensions of a personal vendetta.  But Putin's comments Thursday, as reported by Reuters, could be a sign that he is softening his stance.

Saying that there was “nothing good” about the performance, Putin added: "Nonetheless, I don't think that they should be judged so harshly for this … I hope the court will come out with the right decision, a well-founded one.” In Putinland, that would seem to be a none-to-subtle signal to the courts not to impose the maximum seven year sentence on the three women.  That is the way that Pussy Riot defense attorney Nikolai Polozov is interpreting the comments. “Given the significance of such signals, we can expect some softening of the prosecution's position,” he said.

Putin's position could be the result of growing international pressure over the prosecution of Pussy Riot, which is seen as being largely political.  Their cause has been taken up by groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which declared  Tolokonnikova, Samutsevich and Alyokhina “prisoners of conscience”, to artists like Sting and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to protesters from St. Petersburg to Washington DC, where several dozen DC area “punks” gathered outside the Russian embassy this week.  Lawyer Polozov speculated that the signal from Putin might be to calm foreign investors in Russia over fears of politically-motivated prosecutions.

But Polozov is also sanguine about his clients' prospects, saying on Twitter: “to tell the truth, I don't believe Putin. If the signal gets through and the court reacts, OK, but if not we will fight on.”

Are America's Right Wing Crackpots Harming US Foreign Policy?

In case you missed this story from last weekend, during the latest stop in her whirlwind tour of the world (that so far has taken her to 102 countries) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's motorcade was met in Egypt by a wild mob of protesters who threw shoes and tomatoes at her car while shouting that the US needed to stop its support of the Muslim Brotherhood, the political party of Egypt's new president Mohamed Morsi, along with chants of “Monica!, Monica!” 

As one of the most popular members of the Obama Administration, Secretary Clinton usually doesn't elicit such angry receptions during her state visits, and given that Egypt has long been an American ally, the reception was quite startling.  So what was the motivation behind it?  Apparently elements of America's own Right Wing lunatic fringe.

It seems that Egyptian conspiracy theorists have eagerly bought into some ridiculous claims currently making the rounds of the Far Right fringe that the US government has been infiltrated by radical Islamists.  Ground Zero for these claims is Sec. Clinton herself, who according to the theory, has somehow been brainwashed by her deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, who happens to be a Muslim, and therefore a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Muslim infiltration of the US government has been so successful, according to the theory, that the US has gone on to rig Egypt's election in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, who we are now funding to the tune of $1.5 billion.

This crackpot theory was apparently started by Frank Gaffney, who went from serving in the Reagan administration to peddling McCarthy-style conspiracy theories about evil Muslims lurking in under the beds of Mr. and Mrs. America on internet-radio programs.  Gaffney's delusional ramblings were eagerly picked up and echoed by such Far Right luminaries as Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and blogger Lucianne Goldberg, which explains the “Monica!” chants at least.  The details of this ring of lunacy have been mapped out by both the New York Times and TheRachel Maddow Show.

Of course in America we know better – at least those of us with an IQ higher than room temperature - than to take any of these idiotic ramblings seriously.  We know that these purveyors of nonsense are merely tossing out rhetorical red meat to folks like members of the Tea Party, who think that anyone not as white, Christian and conservative as they are is obviously some kind of foreign agent bent on destroying America.  We know that in this country anyone with a computer and a few dollars can stake out their own corner of cyberspace and fill it with whatever material they want, no matter how ridiculous, so the caveat that “I saw it on the Internet” is something of a joke about the reader's naiveté.

Unfortunately this model doesn't hold true in other countries, especially countries where an autocracy tightly controlled access to the media for decades.  So in a place like Egypt, being on the internet does confer some sense of legitimacy, as does the ability of someone like Frank Gaffney to be able to say they once worked for the President.  It gives his comments a certain weight, even if they sound like they ramblings of a lunatic and are easily debunked.  For example, “Muslim Brotherhood” agent Huma Abedin is also married to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, himself a Jew – hardly the action of a loyal MB member (I know Frank, it is all part of her amazingly clever cover story...).  The US rigging of the recent Egyptian Presidential election similarly makes no sense: if the US was going to rig the election then they most likely would have rigged it in favor of the SCAF-backed candidate Ahmed Shafiq, so that the US might more easily continue its decades-long friendly relationship with the Egyptian military (which is also the true recipient of the $1.5 billion in aid the Right Wingnuts say the US is providing Egypt).  Let's remember the United States' anemic early response to the Egyptian revolution – in part this was driven by a desire to keep our long-time ally Hosni Mubarak in power; it was also driven by the very real fear that if the Mubarak government fell, it's most likely successor would be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, since they were the only opposition party in Egypt with any level of organization.  Rather than wanting a Muslim Brotherhood take-over of Egypt, the United States feared it.

Dealing with idiotic comments is part of the price we pay for the freedom of expression guaranteed to us by the First Amendment.  Most Americans are savvy enough to either ignore comments like those being peddled by this collection of fringe characters or just roll their eyes at their inherent silliness.  Unfortunately folks in places like Egypt don't realize that these statements are the stuff of nonsense, they don't realize that to many Americans, Michele Bachmann is a joke. And, sadly, that means that their craziness is actually harming the United States abroad.

Why Russia Loves Syria

Even though the international community has largely turned against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his government's brutal response to internal dissent, Russia has remained a staunch supporter of the Middle Eastern state.  In my latest post over at The Mantle, I take a look at the why of Russia's backing for Syria.  Rather than just outright anti-Western stubborness by Vladimir Putin, Russian support for Syria is driven by some unexpected factors like religion and a desire to cling to the remnants of their once glorious Soviet past. 

Is Canada Turning Into The United States?

Jokes about the similarity of the two countries have gone on for decades, but some recent moves by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper do beg the question: is Canada turning into the United States?

Environmental and civil rights groups in Canada are up in arms over new proposals from Harper to reform the regulations that manage Canada's natural resources.  The Harper government says that the reforms are meant to reduce redundancy and streamline the approval process for projects in Canada's energy sector, which will benefit all Canadians through lower energy prices and increased exports; environmentalists say the changes are just meant to remove environmental protections, particularly those blocking the expansion of Oil Sands operations in Alberta.  Harper's plan will have the largest impact on a proposed pipeline that will run west from the Oil Sands region through British Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, where tankers can be loaded with the heavy Oil Sands bitumen for shipment to China.  Currently, the pipeline route would have to be evaluated for its environmental impact on each watershed it will cross, and there are many of them in British Columbia; the Harper proposal would mandate that environmental approval would only need to be sought where the pipeline crossed an “official” watershed, a far smaller number.

Harper is presenting this as a net good for Canada: increased exports that will boost the Canadian economy, more jobs and more domestic energy security; opponents say that it is a massive handout to Big Oil and that environmentally sensitive, though not federally-protected, lands will be destroyed by the pipeline.  The Harper government is also putting Canadian environmental groups under closer scrutiny.  Officially, the closer look is meant to uncover donations from foreign sources, which in many cases would be a violation of Canadian law; but again, opponents say that the official story is merely a smokescreen and that the investigations are simply an attempt to silence groups opposed to Harper's policies. 

These investigations come on the heels of a new law passed in Quebec that gives authorities the power to block public demonstrations.  The law follows weeks of street protests by college-aged youth in Quebec protesting hikes in the tuition at provincial universities.  Again, the government and civil libertarians take differing views of the new law: authorities in Quebec say that the law will only be employed in extreme circumstances, noting that the tuition protests have dragged on for weeks, with the protestors refusing to compromise on a proposed deal regarding tuition and that the continuing protests are having a negative impact on the economy in a number of Quebec's cities; civil rights groups though see the new law as nothing more than an attempt to limit the public's right to free speech and assembly and to eliminate dissent.

Meanwhile, Canada is also flexing its military muscles.  Canada is sending 1,400 military personnel, along with five ships and a submarine, to participate in the biannual “Rim of The Pacific” military exercise; all at a time, Toronto's Globe and Mail notes, when the Canada's Defense Department is cutting back on its overall budget.  Canada is also in negotiations for a place in southeastern Asia to host a military “hub” as they're calling it.  The hub would be a way for Canada to have a military presence in a region that is rapidly growing in economic and strategic importance; a likely candidate is reported to be a small port facility next to an airfield in Singapore. Canada's Defense Minister Peter MacKay said that the hub would signal “Canada's intention to reassert our credentials in the Pacific.”

MacKay's announcement followed on the heels of a statement by his opposite number in America, Leon Panetta that the United States was planning to base 60% of its naval forces in the Pacific by 2020. But when you pair Canada's desire for their own slice of the military pie in southeast Asia with Harper's pro-business, and according to critics anti-environmental, energy policy, and new laws that are having a chilling effect on public protests that employ some of the same strategies as the PATRIOT Act, you're seeing policies coming out of the Canadian government that are looking very American.

Iran, US, Others Try One More Time To Avoid War

A meeting is set for tomorrow in Baghdad that could determine the future of the US-led sanctions regime and whether or not there will be another war in the Mid-East this summer, this time over Iran's nuclear program.

The rhetoric out of the region seems to have cooled off a bit in recent weeks – unless, of course, you're Benjamin Netanyahu, who continues to beat the wardrums.  The most likely reason, as explained here, is that all of the parties involved realize that they can't afford a war or a disruption in global oil supplies: not Iran, not the United States and certainly not Europe.  But Iran and Europe can't risk seeing the sanctions regime continue either, the United States, which doesn't import Iranian oil, is largely immune from the impact of the sanctions we've slapped on Iran and are expecting the rest of the world to abide by.

Of course the European economies most vulnerable to the lack of Iranian oil are the European economies in the worst trouble; including Greece and Italy.  Both are suppose to halt imports from Iran on July 1 as per the European side of the sanctions regime, but Italy is owed billions of dollars worth of Iranian oil as payment for infrastructure projects completed by Italian companies, while Greece also has favorable deals with Iran to buy oil, if they need to replace this oil, it will likely be at a higher cost from other sources.  And if Greece drops out/is kicked out of the Euro as some are speculating they will be, they will have to negotiate new oil deals in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis.

From the Iranian side, the sanctions are having an effect on their economy, with food and fuel prices soaring, though the bite is reported to be not as bad as Western authorities expected (there was some foolish hope in the West that the pain caused by the sanctions would inspire the Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government. Good luck with that...).  The Iranian government has stepped in and is offering subsidies to perhaps 60% of the population to help defray costs.  Of course this isn't a sustainable policy for the long run, but so far it seems to be working.  Meanwhile two of Iran's biggest oil customers, China and India, are balking at joining in the US-led sanctions regime.  Oil exports from Iran to China actually increased in April, reversing a decline in March.  Technically, both China and India could face punitive action from the US for not joining in on the sanctions party, but let's see if the US has the nerve to slap sanctions on them.

Of course it's also hard to see how the US and Iran back away from the crisis they have created.  Iran may offer some level of inspection of their nuclear sites, but it is unlikely to satisfy the US, which has demanded a full stop to their nuclear program; from the American side, agreeing to anything less than the full compliance we demanded of Iran will be pounced on by President Obama's Republican opponent in November election as a sign of “weakness” (never mind that it may be the most practical/rational thing to do), so that's unlikely to happen.  And then there's Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu has made a career of stoking fears of an Iranian nuke; it is hard to imagine just what Bibi would accept short of a military raid against Iran, which the US Republicans will expect the Obama regime to fully support...

Navigating out of this quagmire created by political posturing and stubbornness will require some deft political maneuvering and probably more finesse than we can expect from the Baghdad meeting. 

Britain's Prince Harry, or Russia's Next Czar?

As the youngest son of the heir to the British throne, Prince Harry's prospects for ever becoming king are pretty remote, so if he's seeking the top title, Harry may want to consider exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky's proposal.  In one of the crazier political notions to come along in awhile, Berezovsky is, apparently seriously, suggesting that Harry be crowned the next Czar of Russia.

It is part of the platform of Berezovsky's new political party for Russia, the Resurrection Movement.  Among the Movement's other goals are the liberalization of Russia's immigration laws, reform of the legal system and transformation of Russia into a confederation of states.  And then there's the Prince (or Czar) Harry thing... Berezovsky explains that: “returning the monarchy to the throne will reinstate an interrupted chain of time and become a symbol of the rebirth of Russia,” while noting that Harry “has more Russian blood than the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II.”  Prince Harry's great grandmother was a member of Russia's Romanov dynasty – pictures from the era show that Czar Nicholas II shared an amazing likeness with Britain's King George V, his cousin.

Needless to say, this bizarre, amusing proposal will sadly never happen.   Berezovsky, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, said he will not even attempt to register the Resurrection Movement as an official political party in Russia so long as Putin is running the government.  Berezovsky himself relocated to London after getting on the wrong side of Putin.

Africa's Next War: Sudan

Sudan has all but formally declared war on their newest neighbor (and their former countrymen) South Sudan.  That is the message from Sudan's National Assembly, where the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) has voted that a state of war officially exists between the two nations.  They are now urging Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to make an outright declaration of war.

The already poor relations between the two states collapsed last week when the South Sudan military charged across the border and seized the region around the Sudanese city of Heglig.  The South Sudanese maintain that the move was necessary because Sudan was using the city as a base for cross-border military raids and bombing runs against towns and villages in the Nuba Mountains.

But Heglig also happens to be one of the few oil producing regions left in Sudan.  Before the Sudan/South Sudan split last summer, Sudan was an oil exporting nation.  But most of the oil production came from fields located in what's now South Sudan, which has left Sudan with far fewer resources under their control.  Oil continues to be a sore point between the two nations.  Almost all of the oil infrastructure in South Sudan is designed to ship oil north to refineries around Khartoum and export facilities in Port Sudan, both located in Sudan.  The two nations fought over transportation rates for the use of this pipeline network, with South Sudan eventually cutting off all of their exports to Sudan in protest of what they thought was an unfair deal.  While this has been an economic blow to Sudan, it has also been a crushing blow to the fledgling economy of South Sudan, which relies on oil exports for almost 100% of their revenues.

A new war between these two sides is a very real possibility.  For decades they engaged in what was one of Africa's longest-running civil wars.  In 2005, a peace agreement was signed, which stipulated that a referendum on independence would be held in six years.  That vote was held in 2011, with almost 99% of the South Sudanese voting in favor of independence.  The two countries formally split last July.

The Patriarch's Watch

A sharp-eyed member of the Russian bologosphere has swept the head of the Russian Orthodox Church up in a photo controversy. 

The church published a photograph of their spiritual head, Patriarch Kirill, at a meeting, but a blogger noticed something odd.  Taking a close look, they realized that the Patriarch's $30,000  gold Breguet watch had been airbrushed off his wrist, but that a reflection of the watch was still visible in the highly-polished surface of the table where Patriarch Kirill was seated. 

At first, the church denied that the Patriarch was wearing such an expensive watch, then they removed the photo from their official website, before finally admitting to the manipulation.  The Russian Orthodox Church then went on to condemn the digital manipulation of images of the Patriarch adding that “the guilty ones will be punished severely.”  Though Patriarch Kirill himself denies that expensive gold watches are a part of his official attire, another photo of the Patriarch wearing the same $30,000 Breguet while posing with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was also published this past February.

So what's so important about the Patriarch's choice of wristwatch?  Perhaps not a lot, but it is worth noting that after the Russian punk band Pussy Riot's impromptu “punk prayer” performance late last February at Moscow's Christ the Savior cathedral, they claimed part of their motivation was because the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church wore watches worth $40,000 – several years wages for many average Russians.  Two of Pussy Riot's members remain in jail facing charges of inciting religious hatred stemming from the performance, which could earn them seven years in prison.

Could Khodorkovsky Be Freed?

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that pardoning jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a good idea. 

Four days ago, the human rights council appointed by Russia's soon-to-be-ex President Dmitry Medvedev recommended that the President pardon Khodorkovsky before turning the office over to Vladimir Putin; I made the same case recently in an op-ed over at PolicyMic that freeing Khodorkovsky would not only be the right thing to do, but would also assure more of a legacy for Medvedev than simply being remembered as Putin's temporary seat-filler.

Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest man and the head of one of Russia's most-powerful corporations, the oil conglomerate Yukos.  But Khodorkovsky broke an unspoken agreement between Putin and the oligarch class with his donations to a political party in Siberia.  The full legal force of the State was soon brought down on Khodorkovsky, who in 2003 was charged and eventually jailed for tax evasion.  In late 2010, Khodorkovsky was charged again on largely the same evidence and years were tacked on to his sentence, time enough to keep him in jail through the presidential elections held earlier this March.

Khodorkovsky's supporters have long contended that the tax evasion charges were a personal vendetta on the part of Vladimir Putin, arguing that if this was the legal standard, then all of Russia's oligarchs should be jailed.  Even though Medvedev has the power to pardon Khodorkovsky, his supporters are not optimistic.  For one, it seems that in order to get the pardon, Khodorkovsky would have to admit his guilt, something Khodorkovsky refuses to do since he contends he's not guilty of anything.  An admission of guilt is not necessary for a pardon under Russian law, a point ruled on several times by Russia's Supreme Court, though there is a belief that Medvedev would insist on one in order to give Khodorkovsky his pardon. 

This could also simply be an excuse for Medvedev not to exercise his pardon power.  Khodorkovsky's backers further believe that ultimately the decision on whether or not to pardon Khodorkovsky will come from Putin, not Medvedev.  Putin and Khodorkovsky have an active dislike of each other.  In the past Putin has dismissed claims that Khodorkovsky's prosecution was politically-motivated and has insisted that “thieves should sit in jail,” for his part, Khodorkovsky has issued a series of letters from his prison cell in Russia's remote Far East condemning the Putin presidency for failing to fight corruption and for concentrating political power within the Kremlin.    

Electile Dysfunction

The outcome of Sunday's presidential election in Russia was never really in doubt, it was a given that, despite the rash of street protests against him that have marked the past few months, Vladimir Putin would once again be the President of Russia.  The only real open questions were what would be his margin of victory and would the vote be fair.

It seems like the answers to those questions are “too much” and “no”.  According to reports this morning, Putin received roughly 65% of the votes cast – the ballot-counting is not yet complete, but this is being taken as the official margin of victory.  If this 65% figure holds, then Putin wildly outperformed the pre-election polls, which at one point had him in the mid-40s, before moving back above the 50% threshold (where he'd avoid the need for a second-round run-off vote) in the weeks just before the election.  This plays into the story coming from Russian groups like GOLOS and election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who are both talking about widespread reports of “carousel voting” - where one group of “voters” are transported from polling station to polling station, casting votes for Putin at each.  OSCE also slammed the Russian election for not being open to opposition parties beyond the small Kremlin-approved group allowed on the ballot.

The reply out of the Kremlin was predictable; the claims of voter fraud were dismissed as fabrications as they always are.  For his part, Putin talked of the “great victory” he had won for Russia against some vaguely defined opposition force, though the implication was that foreign powers were trying to install some sort of puppet government to control Russia.  It's worth noting here that Putin has repeatedly tried to dismiss the large-scale public protests sparked by Russia's last rigged election this past December as being orchestrated by shadowy “foreign powers”.

Meanwhile, Iran also held elections last Friday for their parliament.  By this morning, the votes had largely been counted and were showing a big victory for the faction controlled by Ayatollah Khamenei over the faction controlled by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  It is now widely expected that Khamenei will use his expanded base of power to try to effectively sideline the populist Ahmadinejad, or perhaps to simply amend Iran's constitution to eliminate the position of president entirely and get rid of the troublesome Ahmadinejad all-together.

Of course, the Iranian election has its flaws as well.  Opposition parties were largely absent from the ballot, making the vote really a choice between the hardliners and the even-more-hardline hardliners.  It was the widespread belief that there had been voter fraud in Iran's last parliamentary elections in 2009 that sparked the “Green Movement”, which for a brief period of time, looked like it might lead to large-scale reform in Iran.  Not wanting a possible repeat, most opposition/reformist parties were simply banned from the ballot in advance of last Friday's vote.  Opposition groups then called for a boycott of the vote, which set the stage for a Khamenei vs. Ahmadinejad battle at the ballot box.

It is too early yet to tell what impact the result of last Friday's vote might have on the ongoing standoff between Iran and the US/Israel over Iran's nuclear program, nor can we tell yet what will be the fallout from the apparently fixed elections in Russia, two factors that should make the next few weeks very interesting.   

Ron Paul, Our (Bad) Ideas Guy

Michael A. Cohen is out with a good piece in Foreign Policy debunking the foreign relations plank of the latest top-tier Republican presidential candidate, Dr. Ron Paul. While he's cast himself staunchly in the conservative/libertarian camp, Ron Paul is drawing interest - and even some measure of support - from folks on the left; high-profile pundits like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher have both voiced their approval for his foreign policy stances, so too have several of my more liberal/progressive friends.  Typically they cite Paul's belief that the United States needs to lessen its military footprint around the globe, along with his opposition to a possible war with Iran as factors that set him apart from the Republican crowd and reasons for their support.

But in reality, these positions are less examples of “good ideas” than they are simply of Paul having a more realistic view of America's current geopolitical situation than do any of his fellow Republican presidential candidates, all of whom have wrapped themselves in the cloak of “American exceptionalism” and all the rhetoric that entails.  The reality is that the United States spends too much money it doesn't have on maintaining a military presence in places that don't really affect life in the USA all that much, like say, Afghanistan, where the US spends billions of dollars a month to prop up the kleptocracy of Hamid Karzai.  In this regard, the US is following in the historic footsteps of other empires like the Roman and British, which spent much money and effort in their declining years meddling in the affairs of minor kingdoms at the fringes of Empire.  As for Iran, it is clear that no military intervention is going to achieve our desired result – the end of Tehran's nuclear research program – nor does our military have the ability to now fight a prolonged war after a solid decade of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Paul's position then is more an accurate assessment of the global situation than it is an example of groundbreaking “good ideas”.

And once you take a step past these Left-approved positions, Paul quickly goes off the deep end.  Paul pushes an isolationist policy, one that would see the United States withdraw from international treaties and bodies (Paul insists that he's not an isolationist since he would allow free trade with foreign nations, though like his defense of his 1980's era newsletters, it is a pretty weak insistence).  Under President Paul, the United States would withdraw from treaties like NAFTA, alliances like NATO, and organizations like the World Health Organization and the United Nations.  So at a time when the world is becoming “smaller”, and countries becoming more integrated, Paul's foreign policy would amount to “hey you kids, get off my lawn”.  For good or bad, the United States can't simply withdraw from the world, not if we expect to maintain our level of international prestige, or keep our economy running – the global economy works because countries are bound together by a host of treaties and compacts, one can't then simply drop these obligations and expect to keep your seat at the table. From the time of our founding, presidents have understood that the United States needs to be engaged with the world.  As a nation, our first military actions abroad were the “Barbary Wars” at the dawn of the 19^th century, where US sailors and marines fought with the pirates of the Barbary Coast (current-day Libya) over their harassment of American merchant vessels.  200 years ago, presidents realized you couldn't simply pull up the drawbridge and disengage from the world, a fact that seems to have escaped Paul today.

From isolationism, Paul's foreign policy musings quickly go into tinfoil hat land.  Part of Paul's opposition to NAFTA is a belief that it is the forerunner to the North American Union – a merger of the US, Mexico and Canada under a single government with a single currency allegedly to be called the “Amero”.  This conspiracy theory has been floating around the Internets since the mid-90s, though Paul has taken it seriously enough to introduce legislation to prevent it from occurring (one does have to wonder why, since clearly the United States would dominate such a union).  But it's not just the NAU that wants to subjugate the USA, the United Nations also has it in for us. According to Paul, the UN is merely a front for a one world government that will deprive Americans of their liberties, including their right to own guns.  Again, here Paul strays into the realm of far-right conspiracy fans, since anyone who has ever had any experience with the United Nations can tell you that the place is far too disorganized to ever come up with a one-world anything.

A fundamental misunderstanding of two centuries of American foreign policy and a penchant for taking far-right Internet ramblings way too seriously, things to consider next time Ron Paul is put forward, like Jon Stewart has done, as our “ideas guy”.

As Iraq Crumbles

Iraq is falling apart at breakneck speed.  With the dust still settling from the US troop convoy out of the country, Iraq is showing every sign of coming apart at the seams. This morning, Baghdad was rocked by a series of coordinated blasts during the morning rush hour that killed at least 50 people and wounded more than 100 others.  But those explosions are masking an even larger problem gripping the Iraqi government.

Earlier in the week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant for Iraq's Vice President, Tariq al-Hashemi, claiming that al-Hashemi was running his own murderous hit squad.  It's worth noting here that this is Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister trying to arrest Iraq's Sunni Vice President.  In response, al-Hashemi fled to the northern city of Erbil, de facto capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, where he was granted protection by Iraq's Kurdish President Jalal Talabani.

So as of Thursday morning, Iraq's whole political system was in a three-sided stand-off broken down along ethnic/sectarian lines.  Part of the reason that this kind of situation could even happen in the first place is that Iraq's national government has obviously taken a lesson from the US Congress and developed an amazing ability to avoid making tough decisions.  The final status of Kurdistan within the Iraqi federal state has gone unresolved for years. The main sticking point is over oil revenues from the oil rich north, which the Kurds think should stay in their autonomous region and the Sunnis/Shiites think should be distributed to the country at-large.  Some oil companies have signed contracts to develop resources in the north with the Kurdish government in Erbil, which the federal government in Baghdad hasn't decided yet whether to honor or not. And then there's the city of Kirkuk, which sits in the middle of Iraq's northern oil patch, that the Kurds say was historically Kurdish and should thus belong to them, but Iraq's Arabs say was repopulated by Saddam Hussein with Shiites and Sunnis and so should not.

Of course the situation involving Iraq's Vice President has sparked claims from the Republican critics in the United States that the possible pending collapse of Iraq is all President Obama's fault for withdrawing US troops too quickly and too soon.  This line of argument ignores the fact that Pres. Obama's decision was motivated by the government of Iraq's refusal to sign an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement (or SOFA) that exempted US troops from prosecution under Iraqi law for any perceived misdeeds (you can only imagine how Obama's Republican critics would have howled if he had left US troops in Iraq without this protection). A larger question for the critics though is if after eight years Iraq's government was so fragile it would start to crack just days after the US withdrew from the country, when then would it be ready to govern? In another five years? Ten? Would the United States need a massive and permanent presence in Iraq to play referee to the feuding ethnic and sectarian groups, and is this what they're advocating?

The United States went to war in Iraq for dubious motives to remove the government of Saddam Hussein.  Our plan for the “day after” Saddam’s fall was to install Ahmed Chalabi, a shifty Iraqi ex-pat, as the new leader, a plan the Iraqis balked at.  It is clear that in the eight years following the rejection of Chalabi, the US never was able to come up with a Plan B other than to try to graft a federal system of government onto three groups with long and contentious histories, a plan that now shows signs, not surprisingly, of coming dramatically apart.

Durban FTW?

The latest round of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (or UNFCCC) wrapped up over the weekend.  Actually the talks, meant to strike an agreement on a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocols that limit global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, were suppose to end on Friday, but went on for an additional day and a half to allow delegates to hammer out a final agreement.

This is being spun in a lot of the media coverage of the talks as a win for the environment, since for the first time all of the 195 nations in attendance agreed in principle to be bound by legally-binding caps on future greenhouse gas emissions.  But you need to read past the headlines on what was actually agreed upon for the full story: first a three-year band-aid was slapped on Kyoto, extending the provisions of the soon-to-expire treaty out to 2015; then the UNFCCC parties agreed to “discuss” a legally-binding pact that would impose emission caps on major GHG emitters that would kick in by 2020.  String that all together and you get an agreement with more wiggle room than a six-year old's front tooth.

The parties in the UNFCCC were to have spent the past two years negotiating a replacement for the Kyoto Protocols to go into effect in 2013, once Kyoto expires.  But the negotiating sessions – Copenhagen, Mexico and now Durban – have all been exercises in delaying action until the next round of discussions.  There's no reason to think this pattern is now going to change during the next three years of “discussions”, especially since the core disagreements remain: the big polluters of the developing world, China and India, argue that it is not fair that they be held to the same emissions standards as the developed world, while the developed world's top emitter, the United States, ably assisted by our less polluting, but more vocal sidekick, Canada (which just pulled out of Kyoto entirely), argue that any future agreement is meaningless unless it binds all top emitters – be they developed or developing – to the same standard.  It's hard to see either side moving from their position during the next three years, not to mention that even if President Obama, in a second-term effort at legacy-building, were to sign onto a binding agreement, it is unlikely Congress would ratify it since some Congressmen view Global Warming as something akin to voodoo and/or a Commie plot to enslave America.  Durban also established a $100 billion fund to help developing nations to offset the costs of climate change (another reason why it is viewed as a “win”), though one country who feels that they may be entitled to payment from the fund is mega-wealthy Saudi Arabia, who argue they should be compensated for possiblefuture reductions in crude oil sales as the world moves on to greener sources of energy.

Frankly, I have a hard time then viewing Durban as anything more than another kick of the proverbial can down the road.  As a friend said, when it comes to the topic of climate change, there are no adults in the room to make the hard choices necessary to actually accomplish something.  Countries will talk about the need to mitigate climate change, but will stop short of any action that could impact the quality of life at home (and thus reduce their leaders chances of staying in power).  And until the day comes that nations/leaders can act in the global interest rather than their own self-serving ones, we'll see more Durbans and more empty promises of change “sometime” down the road.

Putin's Prokhorov Challenge

The unfolding political drama in Russia took another unexpected turn on Monday as billionaire businessman Mikhail Prokhorov threw his hat in the ring as a challenger to Vladimir Putin in next March's presidential elections.  His announcement came after an unusual series of Kremlin-sanctioned political protest rallies took place this weekend, with the largest in Moscow drawing a crowd officially estimated at 25,000.  Prokhorov is apparently hoping that he can ride a wave of political dissent rippling across Russia over elections last weekend that are widely believed to have been fixed in the Kremlin's favor. “I made a decision, probably the most serious decision in my life: I am going to the presidential election,” Prokhorov said at a news conference on Monday to announce his independent bid for the presidency.

In fact, the timing of his announcement was so good that some are wondering if Prokhorov isn't just a stalking horse candidate for Kremlin critics- a safe outlet for disaffected voters that won't challenge the established leadership.  Adding fuel to this theory are the statements over the weekend by one top Kremlin insider who said that Russia needed a new liberal party to serve the mostly urban protesters attending rallies in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities across Russia.

But I think that there are two factors going against this argument.  The first is that there really is no need for a stalking horse-type candidate to ensure an electoral victory for Putin.  While some Russians may be angry, and many more just fed up with the ongoing Age of Putin, none of the three opposition parties in the Duma (the Russian parliament) have anyone to offer up as a candidate with the popularity (albeit damaged popularity) or stature of Putin, meaning that for as much of a pounding as his image has taken in the past week, Vladimir Putin is still odds-on favorite to win the election in March.

Second, even if the Kremlin was going to try to offer up a straw man candidate, Prokhorov is a fairly poor choice since he was already burned politically by the Kremlin just earlier this year.  In May, Prokhorov took leadership of the party Pravoye Dyelo, a name which is alternately translated as Just Cause or Right Cause.  Prokhorov's new party was to be more populist-minded with a pro-business/anti-corruption platform that managed to steer clear of any cutting criticism of either Putin or current President Dmitry Medvedev – a delicate maneuver that left Right Cause open to charges that it was simply another Kremlin-approved opposition party in the mold of A Just Russia (in fact, much of Right Cause's platform seemed to echo the economic reform ideas being pushed by Medvedev earlier this year.  In May, Prokhorov boasted that Right Cause would become the second largest party in the Duma (behind the ruling United Russia of course) following December's elections. 

But Prokhorov seems to have taken his role as leader of Right Cause a little too seriously for some in the Kremlin.  In September, a secret Congress (so secret Prokhorov didn't know about it) was held among some of Right Cause's leaders and Prokhorov was voted out of his leadership role, a move Prokhorov blamed on Vladislav Surkov, a presidential deputy chief of staff, who serves a role for Putin much the same that Karl Rove did for President George W. Bush, and a man who Prokhorov blasted following the secret vote as: “a puppeteer in the country who has long privatized the political system.”  Prokhorov kept a low profile following his ouster from Right Cause, but stated on Monday that he had been planning and putting together the machinery needed to gather the two million ballot signatures required to get his name on the March presidential ballot.

There appears then to be some genuine animosity between Prokhorov and the Putin machine, so it would seem unlikely that he would then secretly be working with them on an ultimately unnecessary political maneuver.  What's more plausible is that Prokhorov, an aggressive businessman who at just age 46 has amassed a fortune in the billions, sees an opening and is planning to take it in terms of Putin's now-waning popularity, and if it is a chance to get back at Putin, whose associate Surkov publicly humiliated him in the Right Cause affair, all the better. 

With his declaration, comparisons are now rightly being drawn between Prokhorov and the last oligarch who challenged Putin publicly and politically, the former head of the Yukos oil conglomerate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is currently languishing in a prison cell in Russia's Far East on some dubious tax evasion charges.  But there is an interesting difference between the two men: in his book on the  Khodorkovsky affair, Putin's Oil, author Martin Sixsmith describes how Khodorkovsky publicly sparred with Putin in the months leading up to his arrest in 2003.  In the weeks before his arrest, Khodorkovsky was urged by friends to follow the lead of other oligarchs who had gotten on the wrong side of Putin and go into self-imposed exile outside of Russia.  But Khodorkovsky instead feverishly tried to negotiate a merger between Yukos and Exxon, his belief was that forming a business alliance with a major Western corporation would provide him with protection against Putin (in Russian the term is krysha, literally: roof) who would not want to damage Russia's image as a place to do business by arresting the head of a multinational corporation on politically-motivated charges.   Khodorkovsky ultimately wasn't able to complete the merger and wound up being arrested as he had feared.

For his part, Prokhorov has the Western business connections Khodorkovsky lacked; among Prokhorov's other holdings are the NBA's New Jersey Nets.  Prokhorov then seems ready to test the Khodorkovsky theorem, how Putin, and the Russian voters, respond will be interesting to see.

United Russia's Bad Day

Pity poor Vladimir Putin, he's gone from the International Man of Action to a guy who can't even properly rig an election.

The results from Sunday's parliamentary elections are (mostly) in, and the ruling United Russia Party took a beating at the ballot box.  During the last elections in 2007, United Russia garnered 64% of the vote, but after Sunday it looks like the party of Putin will be lucky to crack the 50% threshold. With 95% of the ballots counted as of late on Monday, United Russia held a 49.5% share of the vote; in fact there was speculation that the official tally was being delayed so that election officials could “massage” the figures to put United Russia above the symbolic 50% marker.
 
What's more amazing is that United Russia is pulling only about 50% after staging massive voter fraud in their favor.  Reports out of Russia are that there were more reports of irregularities on Sunday than there were during the 2007 vote, which was also viewed with suspicion.  Vote monitors have collected nearly 5,000 reports of voting irregularities from Vladivostok in the Far East, to Kaliningrad, Russia's westernmost European enclave.  The most popular reports are of ballot boxes arriving at polling places pre-stuffed with votes for United Russia and of cadres of citizens being bussed from poling station to poling station, casting votes at each.  But the early results also showed that the Kremlin's decision to install strongman Razman Kadyrov as leader of Chechnya continues to pay dividends as nearly 100% of Chechen voters went to the polls with 99.48% casting ballot in favor of United Russia – I guess Kadyrov allowed the 0.52% of votes for other candidates to make the results look “legitimate”. 
 
Yet it is important to remember that even with widespread reports of voter fraud, United Russia still only received half of the votes cast, meaning actual support for Putin and his party is likely far lower among Russians.  The Russian opposition to Putin, however, did not coalesce around a single opposition party – the Communists are set to come in second with nearly 20%, even finishing ahead of United Russia in some regions; the populist-leaning A Just Russia finished third with 13% and the nationalist Liberal Democrats placed just behind them with 12%.  The liberal Yabloko party failed to break the 7% threshold parties need to pass to earn seats in the Duma.  But opposition parties are challenging the results in some localities and other opposition leaders, like Boris Nemtsov and Eduard Limonov are challenging the legitimacy of the entire election saying that their parties were illegally banned from participating in the election in the first place.
 
Predictably, Kremlin spokespeople tried to spin United Russia's electoral drubbing as a victory of sorts for Putin, noting that since the start of the great Global Recession in 2008 governments have been voted out of office in places like Spain and Great Britain, while in the United States the Republicans scored major electoral victories in 2010.  Thus, they argue, since United Russia managed to stay in power at all is a sign of faith in the party and in the ruling tandem of Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.  And there might even be something to their argument if not for the statements from Russian voters cited in almost any article you read about the elections, noting that their opposition to United Russia crystallized at the time when Putin announced he would be running for president again in 2012 – a sign, they say, that the political system had stagnated and that none of the oft-made promises for reform would ever occur.  Many Russians, the ones brave enough to talk with the press at least, are simply fed up with the now-seemingly eternal Era of Putin and have decided to take it out on his party.

So what will this election mean? In one sense, not much will change. United Russia will still control the Duma, meaning the legislative body is likely to remain little more than a rubber stamp for the Kremlin.  But in another sense, Sunday's elections could be a signal of a turning point, where the typically apolitical Russian public finally starts to engage with their democracy.  As of Monday night, protesters were taking to the streets in Moscow, by some estimates in a crowd of up to 10,000, chanting “Russia without Putin”, a slogan of one opposition movement.  It will be interesting to see how Putin himself responds.  Sunday's election in Russia reminds me of Zimbabwe's last presidential election in a sense.  In Zimbabwe, long-time strongman ruler Robert Mugabe seemed to eschew some of the heavy-handed tactics that had marked the previous presidential election; the result was that Mugabe finished a close second to Morgan Tsvangirai and the reformist Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).  Mugabe decided to take no chances in the runoff, unleashing Zimbabwe's state security forces, along with thugs from his own ZANU-PF party against the MDC with such a degree of violence that Tsvangirai pulled out of the run-off both for his own safety and the safety of the MDC's supporters.

It will be interesting to see if Putin follows a similar tack for the Presidential elections scheduled just three months from now.  While it is hard to see an opposition candidate emerging who could unite Russia's opposition and defeat him, Putin is unlikely to want to take that risk, or to squeak into the presidency with only 40% of the vote in a divided field.  So it is entirely possible that his response could be to crack town even harder on Russia's opposition parties and to engage in even more ballot-rigging.  The question then becomes how will the international community respond to a fraudulent election, and how will the Russians themselves respond.  It's worth noting that at this time last year, it was hard to imagine that Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi would be driven from office by popular revolutions.

Youssou N'Dour's New Gig: Politics

Youssou N'Dour, the singer who is renowned in world music circles and beloved in his native Senegal announced over the weekend that he was tossing his hat into the political ring.  “I will free myself of all artistic commitments from 2 January next year to enter the political arena,” N'Dour told a cheering crowd, according to The Guardian, adding in language similar to former US presidential candidate John Edwards in 2004 that there were now “two Senegals”, one for the haves and one for the have-nots.  “My concern is the Senegal of the have-nots,” N'Dour said in a message broadcast on a Senegalese television station he owns.  What wasn't clear from his announcement was whether N'Dour planned to lend his voice and image to a populist political movement, or if he planned to directly challenge sitting President Abdoulaye Wade's attempt to win a third term in office.

As we discussed here last year, this isn't the first time that N'Dour has flirted with politics.  N'Dour lent his support to a political platform pushing for reform in Senegal last year.  Ironically, N'Dour and Wade were once quite close, but things changed in 2006 when Wade pushed N'Dour to prevent a newspaper he owned from printing negative stories about the president's son.  N'Dour replied that he believed in journalistic freedom and that newspapers should be free to print stories without government interference.  The relationship between the two men quickly deteriorated.

The Guardian notes that unlike many of their West African neighbors, Senegal has a history of stable governments and democratic elections, though Wade is accused of undermining that trend in recent years by claiming a constitutional amendment barring the president from serving more than two terms in office didn't apply to him because it was introduced during his second term.  Other Senegalese are unhappy at the state of the country's economy and that President Wade has spent tend of millions of dollars on projects like “African Renaissance”, a massive statue on a hillside above the capital, Dakar, designed and built, strangely enough, by the North Koreans.  Wade also ordered a rural electrification program that was intended to boost the national economy, but the state electric monopoly, Senelec, has been unable to meet the demand; blackouts have become so common in Senegal that Senelec has acquired the unfortunate nickname of “Darkness, Inc.”

Putin's Boo Birds

An interesting video clip is making the rounds of the social media sites of a live Russian TV broadcast showing Prime Minister (and future President) Vladimir Putin being booed at a public event.  While heckling politicians is something of a national sport in other democracies (the US for example), public displays of displeasure against the Boss are almost unbelievable in Russia.

The setting for the whole booing incident was a mixed martial arts event in Moscow.  After the match, Putin entered the ring to congratulate the winning fighter, and that's where the video clip kicks in.  While the crowd noise is difficult to specifically make out, it is clear that they're not cheering for Putin.  The rather unpleasant din doesn't change to applause for a full 30 seconds until Putin turns to the winning fighter, Russian MMA champion Fedor Emelianenko.  The whole event went out live on Russia's NTV network and then went viral thanks to Russia active blogging community, so far the clip has been viewed more than a half-million times.

It has caused enough of a sensation for Kremlin press flacks to step in with an explanation – that the boos were actually aimed not at Putin, but at Emelianenko 's defeated opponent, American Jeff Monson, who chose Putin's speech as the moment to exit the ring.  It is a marginally plausible explanation – the tight shot on Putin speaking doesn't allow the viewer to see if Monson was in fact leaving the ring, it is noteworthy that the crowd immediately began cheering once Putin introduced Emelianenko.

And to a real extend, it doesn't matter whether the crowd was booing Putin or Monson since the perception via the internet has been set that the crowd's boos were in fact aimed at Putin.  Two recent polls also show the erosion of Putin's once-legendary levels of public support.  The Russian polling firm VTsIOM puts Putin's approval at just over 40%, while the independent Levada Center marks him lower, down at 35% (a figure interestingly reported by Russia's RIA Novosti news service); these may be poll numbers typical for an American president in recent years, but are only about half the levels that Putin enjoyed just a couple of years ago.  Analysts say that Putin's decision to swap jobs with current President Dmitry Medvedev has caused a significant number of Russians to change their view of Putin, thinking that the country will not follow through on the reforms promised first by Putin, then by Medvedev, but rather will enter another era of stagnation like the Soviet Union faced under Premier Leonid Brezhnev in the 1970s.  The global recession is also taking its toll on Russia's economy and, by extension, Putin's popularity, as inflation rises and the cost of living increases.  And there's also a thought that Russians may just be growing tired of Putin's he-man stunts, like wading bare-chested through Siberian rivers, or “just happening” to find antique artifacts while scuba diving.  The same week that Putin stepped into the ring, he also laced on a pair of skates and took to the ice with Russia's “Legends of Hockey” squad for a scrimmage.  These photo-ops that were once amusing, are starting to stray into a Kim Jong-il region of creepiness.

Still, barring an utterly epic change in circumstances, Putin is all but assured victory in the presidential elections next year, a symbol of how effectively the Putin machine has neutered the political opposition in Russia.  But signs of public discontent like the boxing ring booing show that Putin may find governing during his third term to be much more of a challenge than he expects. 

A Resource Curse Prescription For Kurdistan?

Is the Iraqi region of Kurdistan about to feel the effects of the Resource Curse?  That's the feeling you get from this piece in Foreign Policy about the development boom currently underway in the Kurdish capital Erbil. 
 
While suddenly finding vast reserves of a highly-valued natural resource should be a blessing for an under-developed country or region, history has often shown the opposite to be true: rather than focusing on development projects that build infrastructure and improve the lives of the public at-large and establishing a scheme so that all the citizens can share in the windfall produced by the resource in question, what tends to happen is that vast sums of money are spent on lavish, but ultimately ineffectual projects, corruption is rampant, and while a few individuals become fabulously wealthy (typically individuals who are members of or friends with the ruling regime), the masses tend to stay in poverty, sometimes their living conditions actually worsen as has happened in the Niger Delta in Nigeria.  That is the resource curse.
 
And early indications are it is starting to take shape in Kurdistan.  Iraq is widely believed to have the last remaining untapped, easy-to-access oil reserves on the planet – an unintended side effect of decades of sanctions levied against Iraq's former ruler, Saddam Hussein.  It just so happens that a large portion of those reserves lie in the northern portion of the country, in the areas now controlled by the Kurds.  The Kurds are eager to exploit these resources and have begun signing contracts with foreign oil companies.  This has led to a massive influx of foreign cash to Erbil.  But how much of that cash is making its way to average Kurds at this point is unclear.  That, as FP notes, Erbil now has three luxury hotels under construction, but no modern hospitals, is not a good sign.
 
To make matters worse, the Kurds and the national government in Baghdad are still negotiating over who actually controls the northern oil fields and how the revenue will be divided, meaning there's no master plan for how the oil revenues will be used, nor apparently is there adequate oversight of the oil projects getting underway, all of which makes it likely that Kurdistan could be the latest victim of the resource curse.

Real Housewives of the Kremlin

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has long been the United States' official journalistic voice to the world, and a source of quality reporting, which makes the appearance of this rather tabloid-y (but still interesting) story about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rather interesting.  In it, journalist and German intelligence expert,  Erich Schmidt-Eenboom makes the claim that during Putin's time as a KGB agent in East Germany, a West German counter-agent was able to penetrate his inner circle and become a close confidant to Putin's wife Lyudmila, and that's where the juicy details come in.  According to the report, Lyudmila Putina confided to the agent, identified as a woman called “Lenochka”, that Putin was a womanizer who regularly beat her.  Lenochka herself was later removed from the assignment after falling in love with the KGB colonel who ran Putin's unit.

It is a description of the Putins relationship at odds at least with the carefully-crafted public image of the couple.  Shortly after Putin quickly rose from obscurity to become President Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, a biography of personal anecdotes from Putin's early years called First Person was published; one of the stories it contained was how in the early days of his marriage Putin nursed Lyudmila back to health after she was badly injured in a car accident.  However, as RFE/RL notes, Putin has otherwise been fiercely protective of his private life, with his daughters never appearing in public or the press and, as RFE/RL wryly notes, public appearances with Lyudmila “have become as rare as Siberian yeti sightings.”  Now it is one thing to keep his daughters out of the public eye, but politicians wives are expected to pubicly support their husbands, which makes Lyudmila's absence all the more unusual, fueling rumors that the couple had in fact divorced or that Putin was keeping a girlfriend on the side, possibly (according to Russia's version of gossip columnists) former Olympic gold medalist, gymnast and current member of parliament, Alina Kabayeva.

Beyond the sleazy salaciousness of the Putin story, I also find it interesting that RFE/RL chose to run such a gossipy piece in the first place.  You have to wonder if this is part of a subtle media campaign to undermine the public image of the once and future President of Russia, since the column has appeared shortly after Putin announced that he, rather than current President Dmitry Medvedev, would be representing the United Russia party in next year's presidential election.  And then there is the sinking popularity of United Russia itself.  While still the dominant party in Russian politics, United Russia's own popularity is waning.  In a recent poll, only 51% of Russians said they would support United Russia, a drop of 9% from the previous poll.  In an effort to boost their profile ahead of parliamentary elections in December, United Russia released an edgy TV ad designed to appeal to young voters: in it a young woman exchanges glances with a young man before stepping into the voting booth, her hand then shoots out from behind the voting booth curtain, grabbing him and dragging him inside.  After a few seconds, the two disheveled voters emerge from the booth with the tagline “Let's Do It Together” then appearing on screen (y'know, vote).  The racy ad is being roundly criticized by opposition politicians who note that voting is something one is suppose to do alone.