Russia-Middle East connection. (The Last Word).(Brief Article)

Do you drive a car or heat your home? Then you undoubtedly have had at least a few fleeting anxious thoughts since September 11th about how the war on terror and the escalating turmoil in the Middle East will affect gas pump prices and the family energy budget. That's understandable; our country's unnatural dependence on foreign energy has made each of us to some degree hostage to events in far-off lands.

In the bad old days of the Evil Empire, Americans generally understood that one of the top reasons the Kremlin strategists targeted the Middle East was to control the West's oil supplies. Thus, the Soviets expended immense efforts (including mountains of armaments, oceans of rubles, and armies of military advisers) to establish surrogate terrorist regimes in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, and Algeria, and to build "independent" actors such as the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.

What a difference a few short years can make! Now Russia is our partner in the war on terror and, according to the November 11th edition of The New York Times, President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that "Russia, the world's second -largest oil producer, stands ready to ensure the West's energy security in the event of war or disruption in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf." Mr. Putin even signed on to U.S. use of military bases in the Central Asian states of Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Kazakhstan to aid the fight against al-Qaeda-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Pardon me for raining on a very big parade, but for some reason a line from a cautionary children's poem keeps coming to mind: "'Come into my parlor,' said the spider to the fly." We are already far into the sticky, entangling web; if we do not soon extricate ourselves, we will become fatally entrapped.

While the world's attention was fixed on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, events far less noticed, though every bit as important, were taking place that may radically alter the global economic, energy, and security pictures. The oppressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan has been replaced by an interim government composed of terrorists from the Russian- and Iranian-backed Northern Alliance, leaving the Moscow strategists to call the shots in Kabul, but in a more covert fashion than during their previous military occupation of the country.

The new Moscow-Tehran-Kabul axis takes on great significance when viewed in connection with the larger picture of Russian moves in the Transcaucusus, Caspian, Middle East, and Indian Ocean regions. In ...