XANDER BLAKELY BLOG

6:30

So, I'm having the quintessential California day, biking in the foothills in the morning, reading at a sunny sidewalk cafe in the afternoon, swimming in the evening at an outdoor pool. Paradise. When I get out of the pool, a man and his young son are getting into the pool. The man has a thick Russian accent. He asks me, "Vat time does ze pool close?" I answer him "Pol syedmovo" (6:30), thinking that speaking in Russian might make him feel good, more comfortable. (I've done this a hundred times with Russians here in the states, and the reaction is almost always positive.) Instead, his tan face went white and his muscles went rigid.

"Why are you speaking Russian to me?" he asked, in English. "Are you with the KGB?"

"No," I answered, "but I did live in Siberia for a few years."

He asked the usual question: "Why?"

I told him the short version of my Siberian years. He was nonplused. Nobody he knew had ever gone to Siberia voluntarily. He told me that he had learned to fear the KGB a long time ago. He gave me vague details of being 'interviewed', but said that the memory of the experience still gives him the shivers. His crime: going to Latvia to advocate for human rights.

Because most (certainly not all) of my experiences in Siberia have been, and continue to be, invigorating, I occasionally forget that for some people, Siberia will always be as dreaded a word as Dachau is for Jews and Gypsies. For some people, the Russian language, even if it is their native tongue, will always sound fearsome.

Profits Up In The Air

What is wrong with this picture?

The US government recently gave $15 billion (that's BILLION) of tax-payer money to support extremely unprofitable airlines. Here is the 3-year history of American Airlines' stock price:

Meanwhile the notorious Russian airline, Aeroflot, is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the Soviet system. It's not only profitable ($73M in the black compared to American Airlines' $2.5B in the red), it has earned an enviable safety record, and is launching a savvy campaign to compete head-to-head with the first-world's airlines.

Caught in Crossfire

If you've been following the Russian media war coverage, as I have, you were also surprised by how much the Russian press downplayed yesterday's incident of Russian ambassador Titorenko's convoy getting caught in US-Iraqi crossfire. There were some serious injuries, but, fortunately, nobody was killed. The incident hasn't been burried in Russian papers, but it hasn't been a banner headline piece either.

Of course Alexander Manikov, a Russian war correspondent who has given some really pathetic and even irresponsible reports of late, was in the convoy and tried to portray the incident in the worst possible light. Keeping with his habit of using selective observations to make damning implications about the US, he said in this report of the incident that he doesn't blame the Iraqis who naturally fired at them because the Americans seemed to have started the conflict, and that the bullet holes in the embassy's vehicles looked like American M16 bullet holes. He also complains that a US military convoy didn't stop to help. Interestingly, the injured Russians sought out and received medical attention, but the report doesn't mention whether they got attention from US doctors or from the Iraqi doctors. (If you were injured, would you go to the Republican Guard doctors or to the US Army doctors for help?)

When I first read the New York Times article, I thought that this was going to produce the same fallout as the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia. However, I think Russia's desire to be a part of the rebuilding of Iraq will make this incident a quickly forgotten asterisk of history.

War Coverage

Keeping an eye on the coverage of the war in Iraq (or, as Arab media call it, the war on Iraq) has been amusing, depressing, and, at times, downright scary.

Last week, the US media got impatient and started asking if we were in another Vietnam yet (as hilariously captured here by Slate's Daryl Cagle)

Russian media were eager to portray this slowdown in Iraq as the beginnings of America stumbling into its own Chechen quagmire. (Don't forget, many Russians predicted that the US would meet a similar fate as the Soviets if they were so foolish as to invade Afghanistan.)

Interestingly, some of the best coverage of the war in Iraq, according to this British report, comes from Russian spies. Apparently, it's so good that market watchers are making a figurative killing by trading on the Russian G2 covering the literal killings going on in Iraq.

Some of the worst coverage, however, comes from the Russian news agencies. What follows are some reports from Russia's Vesti news service:

Reason to Cheer

Before I started reading the usual harrowing news about the war in Iraq this morning, I found this article. It's beautifully written and it made me feel hopeful. It's about how baseball has quietly gone from a uniquely American game to a truly international game, and in the process, has become profoundly even more American in spirit.

(My guess would be that the only other major organization that has a more integrated roster than baseball is the US military. That would be my guess, but I'd be wrong.)

Baseball has even started to sink roots into the cold soil of Russia. This sweet article highlights how some Russian kids overcame long odds to make it to the Little League World Series. It reads like a post-cold-war version of the Bad News Bears. Bears, get it?

Accusations and Denials

Both American and Russian newspapers carry Bush’s accusations and Putin’s denials of Russian arms sales to Iraq. I’m pretty sure that the accusations are true (see my reasoning below), but, like much of Bush’s diplomatic efforts, they are likely to only further sicken already ailing relations with a much-needed ally in the war on terror.

Putin’s denials are not very powerful, nor are they very credible, but they are not unprecedented either. The 40th President of the US was accused, though never convicted, of selling arms to an Axis-of-Evil nation: Iran.

Back in the 1990’s, I visited, almost by accident, a Russian arms factory in Siberia. (You can read about the absurd experience in my book.) My Siberian business partners took me there without telling me it was a military factory. We were looking to rent warehouse space for the trainloads of cocoa beans we were importing for Siberian chocolate factories. With me pretending to be Russian, we made it past security and were shown into the office of the director of the arms factory. He was proud of the quality of weapons they produced, but he was frustrated that he wasn’t allowed to sell them to anybody but the bureaucrats in Moscow, who paid poorly and never on time. He was struggling to find a way to pay his employees. It was clear to me from his tirades that he would have loved to a) sell his products directly on the open market and b) have his products ‘tested’ against the best in the world (i.e. the US military). This second desire was clearly a reflection of his genuine respect for the US military. He seemed to have no animosity for America; most of his venom he saved for, as he called them, the “bastards in Moscow.”

Bottom line: Just as it is a scorpion’s nature to sting, it is a manufacturer’s nature to sell his products, even if they're deadly arms, to buyers, even if they’re wicked tyrants.

(I’m not am impartial spectator in this diplomatic row. My brother is a US Marine Corp pilot. He is in Iraq flying an AV-8 Harrier to destroy Saddam’s regime and to liberate the Iraqis. (In his last email, sent just a few days before the war started, he said that he was reading Tocqueville in his few spare minutes to better understand democracy and America.) So these alleged Russian arms sales puts my brother at greater risk. This concerns me.

More Accusations and Denials…
In related, but mostly ignored in the US, news, Russia has accused the US of Cold War practices by spying on Russia with planes that are supposed to be locating Chechen terrorists in Georgia. Georgia’s defense minister confirmed that US planes might, on occasion, stray into Russian airspace. Imagine the headline if Russian airplanes were found a) flying in Northern Mexico supposedly to help locate separatists rebels and b) these Russian planes strayed into US air space.

I don't know if Bush stopping US spy planes allegedly flying over Russian airspace would cause Putin to stop the alleged arms sales to Iraq. I'm pretty certain, however, that Bush's public accusation won't stop them. As I said before, this concerns me.

Rastafarian in Siberia

In a bold publicity stunt, Rastafarian singer Lenky Roy agreed to go to Siberia to promote his new album called, you guessed it, Siberia. With the war in Iraq stealing all of the media attention from this extreme cross-cultural and cross-country adventure, I decided Lenky and his posse could use all the help they can get. (Plus, I know how difficult it is to publicize anything, for example a book, about Siberia here in the US, especially if you're trying to break the stereotype bonds of gloom and gulags.)

Wired Magazine has some video footage as well as excerpts from one of the participant's diary. Unfortunately, it's not easy to find the online adventure on the Wired website unless you know it's there. Even then, it's difficult to navigate. So, I've done all the searching and listed the video clips and diary entries below:

Remember the Russians

This piece in the Washington Post suggests that Bush should have and could have convinced the Russians to support the war in Iraq, which would have served as a tipping point within the Security Council and brought about broad UN support for the war...and the peace afterwards.

Al Qaeda's Manifesto

There is an insightful piece in the New York Times Magazine about the philosophical roots of Al Qaeda's global terrorist agenda. Sayyid Qutb wrote 'In the Shade of the Koran', a voluminous work that is to militant Islam what Karl Marx's Manifesto was to Communism, what Vladimir Lenin's writings were to Bolshevism, what Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was to Nazism. (Qutb, who was a contemporary of Hitler and Lenin, also wrote from prison.) His first book, Milestones, was an early inspiration for terrorism, but was dismissed as shallow in the West. The author of the Magazine article, Paul Berman, argues that dismissing Qutb is foolhardy.

According to Berman, "Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things."

Russian Reaction to War

Putin's Tirade
The video and the text of President Putin's stern condemnation of the US-led war, which he calls a "Big political mistake."

"The first Russian casualties of war in Iraq."
That's how the head of the Lotoshino village described himself and his fellow villagers, who had made big plans to host Vernon Jones, the 'CEO' of DeKalb county and self-proclaimed friend of Michael Jordan. Jones decided to cancel his trip to the remote Russian farming community due to the war in Iraq. Here is the video of all the things the village had planned for Jones, including a disappointed milk maid and a long-tongued cow. Here is the text of the report.

Russian Eye on Iraq
This page seems to be a running war news ticker, complete with countdowns to each wave of American bombs to fall on Baghdad.

After Saddam
The Russian government is officially against the war in Iraq, but they've already expressed an interest to work with the next Iraqi leaders.

Bush Bashing
Even former Soviet leader Gorbachev is doing some Bush bashing at the end of this article, which also features this memorable quote from a Kuwaiti man, "Bush is a real man," Ahmad Hussein Ahmad said, fiddling with the prayer beads in his hand. "His dad liberated Kuwait and now the son will liberate Iraq."

World War Three
Of course, Vladimir Wolfovich Zhirinovsky, the foul-mouthed leader of the LDPR, has called the war in Iraq the beginning of World War Three.

Give'm Hell, Harry
Here is a video report from Konstantine Syemin, a Russian reporter aboard the USS Harry Truman. (Here is the text version.) That a Russian journalist can wander freely about a US military vessel makes me hopeful. Syemin films the crew working on the flight deck, sailors eating in the dinning hall, and even a Muslim sailor praying in the ship's secluded prayer space. Hopefully world events will make it possible, perhaps in a few years, maybe sooner, for Iraqi journalists to be so welcome aboard US vessels as well as in the US itself.

Free Crank Calls
Here is a story about a Russian phone company is giving away free calls to Russians if they want to call the White House and rant at Bush. Many are taking advantage of the offer and making the calls.

Putin's Puzzling Position
The Guardian has this piece analyzing Putin's stance against the US war in Iraq, which threatens his important strategic relationship with America. In Russia, though the majority of the population is against the war, few are protesting in the streets. There were a few hundred communists, prone to pathological protesting and some protestors who were paid by the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

After the meeting, "party worker Volodya began to give out cash", said the paper. Many protesters demanded more money because they had "waved the flags well" or because "they brought their husbands with them".

Protests
This Moscow Times article has this remarkable quote:

A placard hanging around the neck of a 66-year-old woman read
"Saddam Hussein, Today's Stalin."

"Saddam is acting right. He's not giving up,'' she said. "They will fight to the last.''