At several decisive points in the middle of this decade key Russian officials - including the country's foreign and defense ministers and top military commanders - warned against military attacks against Iran. It is to be assumed that such public pronouncements as well as back channel communications may well have stayed the hand of the U.S., Israel and perhaps both.
However, with the Russian political leadership's turn toward the U.S, and NATO, the prospects of an attack against Iran and all the catastrophic - perhaps cataclysmic - consequences it will unavoidably bring in its wake is heightened dramatically. To an extent that the conflagrations in Afghanistan and Iraq will seem mild in comparison.
In the past year and a half the only military-security formation Russia is a member of - the Collective Security Treaty Organization - has been weakened, perhaps fatally, with Belarus and Uzbekistan drawing back from commitments and joint exercises and the remaining members - Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - being courted and in varying degrees won over by the U.S. and NATO.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, once a model and a source of inspiration for the world, has degenerated into an ineffectual forum, with this year's summit in Uzbekistan a non-event where Russia's Medvedev stated that "Countries which have difficulties with their legal status cannot claim SCO membership." An allusion to Iran and the sanctions Medvedev's government had voted for two days before.
In February of this year Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov hosted Madeleine Albright and her NATO Group of Experts at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations as part of a tour in preparation for presenting a report on the military bloc's new Strategic Concept.
A leading Russian think tank, the Institute of Contemporary Development, issued a report whose contents, divulged in early September, detailed prospects for Russia collaborating more closely with NATO, even discussing the nation joining the Alliance. President Medvedev is the chairman of the institute's supervisory board.
Two days after the NATO summit in Lisbon ended, Eduard Shevardnadze, former president of Georgia ousted by the "Rose Revolution" and the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union, told one of his nation's newsweeklies that "Russia will become a NATO member soon." [21]
In an analysis published three days before the Lisbon summit, Victor Kovalev, a corresponding member of Russia's Military Science Academy, warned of what confronts Russia as it intensifies its collaboration with NATO:
"The NATO summit which will convene in Lisbon on November 19-20 will adopt the alliance's new strategic concept switching NATO from regional defense to global-scale missions. In practice, the reform will institutionalize the West's victory in the Cold World War III. The already visible results of the victory include the ongoing departure from the Yalta-Potsdam system and the downscaling of the role played by the UN --" or at least by the UN Security Council --" in international relations."
"The new world order built as we watch on the ruins of the Yalta-Potsdam system automatically energizes a range of negative global processes and is prone with new wars or major regional conflicts. At the moment, the situation in the Far East already appears similar to that in Europe on the eve of World War II." This week's developments on the Korean peninsula bear out the contention.
"Under the circumstances, Russia's priority should be to avoid being dragged into the epicenter of the coming collapse. Hoping to get rid of competitors in the post-capitalist world and to enforce a 'final solution' of the Russian problem, the West is luring Russia into this very epicenter." [22]
The author also pointed out that by assisting the U.S. and NATO in their plans for Eurasia and much of the rest of the world Russia risks alienating the Muslim world. Approximately 20 percent of Russians are Muslims or of Muslim religious background and in 2005 Russia became a permanent observer at the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Russia will also "be neutralized during the planned attack against Iran," though still be affected by whatever broader consequences such an action would entail.
It will expend material resources and political capital on the flagging and failing war in Afghanistan which has already contributed to an explosion in opium production that has led to 2.5 million heroin addicts and 30-40,000 annual overdoses in Russia according to the nation's Federal Drug Control Service.
The Russian analyst also stated that increased cooperation with NATO would lead to Russia Moscow "see[ing] its promising dialog with Beijing suspended as China would end up fully encircled" by a U.S.-created Asian NATO.
Russia will also be expected to distance itself from historical allies in the Arab world like Syria and Libya and to abandon burgeoning relations with Latin American partners like Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Nicaragua and Venezuela have recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which none of Russia's partners in the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have yet to do. The U.S. and its NATO allies - President Medvedev's new friends - are adamant in branding the two new nations Russian-occupied Georgian territories. Moscow will be punishing its real friends and rewarding its competitors and adversaries.
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