As for ‘my foreign policy?’ he said. ‘Don’t do stupid shit.’ He agonized over how to end the 9/11 wars and tried to reset the US relationship with Putin. America’s Iraqi catastrophe was an opportunity for Putin, who hated Obama, for him the personification of American humbug.
Putin waited for a chance to assert Russian power in his sphere, embracing the myth of the Broken Promise: Bush and Clinton had promised not to extend NATO eastwards and yet now Ukraine was moving towards membership. ‘Not one inch to the east, they told us in the 1990s,’ said Putin in December 2021. ‘They cheated, just brazenly tricked us.’
It was only a matter of time before Belarus, ruled by a porcine tyrant, former director of a collective piggery, would return to the Muscovite fold, but huge, proud Ukraine, divided, ill led and beset by corruption, still had dangerous potential as a democracy that could undermine Putin’s autocracy and his imperial millenarian vision of the Russian World. In 2004, a pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, keen for Ukraine to join NATO and the EU, was set to win presidential elections. Putin ordered FSB agents to poison the candidate, who only just survived, his face scarred. Then an attempt to rig the election for Putin’s candidate, the corrupt, brutish Viktor Yanukovych, was foiled by 200,000 Kyivans who occupied central Kyiv in their Orange Revolution. To Putin, the Russian state was unthinkable without Ukraine. ‘What is Ukraine?’ Putin asked. ‘Does it exist as a country?’ He added, ‘Whatever it has, is a gift from us.’ He regarded Ukraine and Belarus as little Russias with no independent right of existence.*
Putin watched and waited. His first opportunity came in tiny but defiant Georgia. Putin despised Shevardnadze, who had given away the empire. When in 2003 the Grey Fox, by then seventy-five, faced a revolution led by the young, showy American-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, Putin refused to back the old leader. Shevardnadze retired.
Putin watched Saakashvili’s posturings with contempt. When Saakashvili, encouraged by America, challenged the Russian clients in Ossetia, Putin snarled, ‘Bring me Saakashvili’s head,’ and invaded, routing the Georgian forces.* America protested but did nothing.
Now Obama flew in to see Putin. At his mansion at Novo-Ogarevo, Obama observed Putin: ‘short and compact – a wrestler’s build – with thin, sandy hair, a prominent nose, and pale, watchful eyes’, exuding ‘a practiced disinterest … that indicated someone who’d grown used to power’. He reminded Obama of a Chicago ‘ward boss, except with nukes’.
Ironically Putin’s view of American presidents was almost identicaclass="underline" he advised his henchmen to watch his favourite Netflix drama House of Cards to explain US politics. ‘Don’t harbour any illusions,’ he later lectured Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden. ‘We’re not like you, we may look like you but … inside we have different values.’ Obama listened to Putin accuse America of being ‘arrogant, dismissive, unwilling to treat Russia as an equal partner’. Putin worked to redress the balance: in 2010, his vassal Yanukovych won the Ukrainian elections, then, in the Arab world, he found a further opportunity.
BASHAR, THE BAYONET AND THE MONA LISA OF INDIA
On 6 March 2011, in the southern Syrian town of Deraa, fifteen schoolchildren mocked the young dictator Bashar al-Assad in graffiti on the walls of their school, inspired by demonstrations against the dictators of Tunisia, and then of Egypt, Libya and Yemen, communicating by the exciting encoded medium of WhatsApp. In Deraa, the hated governor, a cousin of Assad, arrested the schoolchildren and tortured them. When their families protested, the army fired on them. The town rose in rebellion, which spread across Syria.
In 2000, when Hafez al-Assad died, the thirty-four-year-old ophthalmologist Bashar succeeded to the throne, marrying a British-Syrian surgeon’s daughter, Asma, who was an unlikely recruit to the Mafia-style family – a private schoolgirl (then known as Emma) and French literature graduate. Anisa, Bashar’s mother, had disapproved of the marriage: she wanted Bashar to marry a cousin. But the couple were in love. Asma gave Bashar the pet name Batta – Duck. When she arrived, the Assads isolated her.
She and Bashar promised reform and courted the west. Vogue magazine hailed Bashar as ‘wildly democratic’ and Asma as the ‘rose of the desert … glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies … a thin, long-limbed beauty … breezy, conspiratorial, and fun’. Vogue was right about the conspiracy: in 2006 when the Lebanese billionaire Rafic Hariri, former and future premier, challenged Syrian power, Bashar ordered his killing in a car bombing, which so outraged the Lebanese that he was forced to withdraw his troops. Sensing ‘a great conspiracy’, Dr Assad sent tanks and troops against his own students, teenagers and Islamicists. ‘My father was right,’ he said. ‘Thousands of deaths in Hama bought us three decades of stability …’
On 17 February 2011, Libyan cities rebelled against the Neronian dictator Qaddafi, who, assisted by his son Saif al-Islam, threatened that the rebels, these ‘cockroaches’, would be ‘hunted down street by street, house by house until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum’. Obama was determined to avoid any interventions. In Egypt, Mubarak, who had been in power since Sadat’s assassination, faced a popular revolution and looked to Obama for support. Obama refused: Mubarak resigned. In Libya, Qaddafi had lost half of the country, but he promised, ‘Everything will burn.’ David Cameron, fresh-faced young British prime minister, regarded Qaddafi as ‘Mad Dog, a horrific figure who sold Semtex to the IRA’ and ‘ordered the downing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie’. He called Nicolas Sarkozy, the diminutive, manic French president, to discuss an intervention. Obama was, recalled Cameron, ‘unenthusiastic’. But now Qaddafi’s forces were advancing on rebel Benghazi.
On 28 February, Cameron suggested a no-fly zone; NATO agreed to intervene to save lives, and Obama delivered air cover. Qaddafi threatened to kill Cameron and his family. Beginning on 20 March, NATO air forces, led by Britain and France, attacked Qaddafi’s forces for months until the regime cracked. On 15 September, Cameron and Sarkozy visited Tripoli: ‘we’d promised we’d go together … We wove through jubilant hordes to a stage in Freedom Square and gave speeches as 10,000 people chanted Cam-er-on and Sar-koz-y! Still we had no idea where Qaddafi was …’
Putin approved the NATO campaign, provided Qaddafi himself was not targeted. Anglo-French air strikes strafed the colonel’s convoy. ‘They say they don’t want to kill him,’ sneered Putin, ‘so why are they bombing him? To scare the mice?’ On 20 October, near Sirte, NATO got him. Qaddafi, wounded and hiding in a drainage pipe, was captured, wounded in the stomach, then, filmed on a smartphone, sodomized with a bayonet and finally shot dead. Watching the video of the tormented tyrant, Putin saw himself: ‘You could end up losing Russia. Qaddafi thought he’d never lose Libya but the Americans tricked him.’ So this was American freedom: ‘All the world saw him being killed, all bloodied. Is that democracy?’ He would not let it happen again: in Syria, Putin backed Assad.
As the revolution reached the suburbs of Damascus, Assad, backed by his brother Maher, his Alawite clan and secular Sunnis, treated his own country as enemy territory: ‘Assad or We Burn the Country’ was their slogan. He released Islamic jihadis from prison to taint the rebels; his secret police tortured and slaughtered many; he launched unrestrained bombing and chemical attacks. As pandemonium spread, Assad flirted with gushing girls in his office, and Asma spent $250,000 on new furniture online. While Maher led the 4th Armoured Division against the town of Homs, Asma reviewed Christian Louboutin shoes online. ‘Does anything catch your eye?’ she emailed a friend. When her friend, a Qatari princess, warned her she was in denial, Asma responded, ‘Life’s not fair, my friend, but ultimately there’s a reality we all need to deal with.’