Mission to Moscow: Putin Shows Up Blair

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And a note on the oily elephant in the room

The fruits of Tony Blair's meeting with Vladimir Putin are summed up in the headline of today's Guardian report: "We Are Not With You and We Don't Believe You."

Here's something else. Yesterday the Guardian and others carried reports of Tony Blair's warning to France that it could find itself on the wrong end of a new Cold War. This follows an allegation earlier in the week that France had been briefing Saddam on its dealings with the US.

Question: How is it that France and Russia have been so consistently in the forefront of international opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, and why are theirs the first western states to come up whenever charges of secret aid to Saddam are bandied around?

During the war I've thought back often to a comment Noam Chomsky made in one of the talks collected in his recent book Power and Terror. This is from a Q&A session at Berkeley in March 2002:

We know [Saddam's] crimes are not the reason for the intended conquest. Nor is it his development of weapons of mass destruction. If those aren't the reasons, what are the reasons? Well, the reasons are pretty obvious. Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia.... Certainly the United States is going to deny those resources to its adversaries. Right now France and Russia have the inside track... and the United States is looking to take it over. [emphasis added]

I've been meaning to look up some online backgrounders on the recent history of France and Russia's relationship to Saddam and to Iraqi oil; I'll try to post a few in the next few days. Meantime, if any of you have seen good accounts of this backstory, please send them along with a link to sperry@citypages.com, and thanks.

PS: A few hours ago Al-Jazeera posted this polemical primer on the US's interest in Iraqi oil.