WILL TWO YOUNG PRESIDENTS FACE OFF IN 2009?

He is four years younger than Barack Obama but like him he is a lawyer and a cool customer. He is also married to his childhood sweetheart and places a lot of emphasis on his family. But that is perhaps where many of the similarities end between Russian president, Dimtri Medvedev and America’s new president-elect.
Before Barack Obama could savor the joy of his election victory, Medvedev left him no doubt that when he enters the White House he will be dealing with a tough opponent in the Kremlin. In a public display of anger, Medvedev issued his strongest condemnation of the United States, threatening to place missiles close to the Polish border and to make a U.S. missile shield unworkable if it was placed in Poland. He also blamed America for a global economic meltdown and only grudgingly offered Barack Obama congratulations.
The Russian leader has probably been well briefed about Barack Obama and some of the information he is likely to have received may have been obtained illegally. According to the FBI, the computer systems of the Mc Cain and Obama campaigns were hacked by a foreign power, or powers, and over a sustained period the strategy plans of the campaigns were uploaded and transferred to foreign sites. While the Bureau refuses to point an accusing finger at Russia or China the likelihood is that they were the culprits. Over the past decade, China and Russia have authorized major intrusions into Pentagon and U.S. military and naval computer networks. If Russia was involved, its aim may have been to find out as much as possible about the dueling candidates for president, knowing Medvedev would have to negotiate with one of them come January.
Barack Obama will no doubt want to be fully briefed about his opposite number because relations between Russia and the U.S. have not only cooled but have become hostile in the latter stages of the Bush presidency. While a President Obama will learn all the secrets the CIA and NSA have amassed about Medvedev there is still a fair amount of information about him in the public domain.
For example, he was born in 1965 and grew up in a 430- sq ft. flat on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. It is a fact he likes to emphasize to indicate he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. By his own admission, he was a good student in his teens but he secretly developed a love of Western hard rock music that was banned at the time by the communist authorities. Using the black market, he bought lots of vinyl recordings of his favorite band, Deep Purple to the extent that today he has a huge collection of old vinyl discs, including many with songs by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. In his youth, it was a hobby he shared with his childhood sweetheart, Svetlana Vladimirovna, with whom he spent most of his time. The moment they left Secondary School they were married. He was 17 and she was 16. They later attended St. Petersburg University where he graduated with a PhD in law and she was awarded a Masters in economics. When he was 23, he took the unusual step of getting baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. He has since said it was a personal decision that signaled a new beginning to his life. Part of the new beginning was working as an assistant law professor but before long he drifted into political life in St. Petersburg and met Vladimir Putin, a rising political star. When Putin became prime minister under Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, he sent word to Medvedev to join him in Moscow. Medvedev accepted and Putin appointed him deputy chief of the Kremlin staff. It was thestart of a meteoric rise for the young lawyer and it was clear Putin, the old KGB officer, was grooming his young friend for something bigger. In 2005, after Putin had been president for four years, he appointed Medvedev deputy prime minister. Later he made him head of Gazprom, the world largest gas corporation. It was a central plank in Russia’s economic revitalization, as well as a core element in its strategy of using energy as a political weapon.
For some of the old communist guard, Medvedev was too liberal for their liking. He advocated private property ownership, lower taxes, an independent judiciary and economic deregulation. Within communist party circles in Moscow he was accused of promoting policies that smacked of Western capitalism. None of that appeared to worry his mentor, Vladimir Putin. He was busy imposing his will on the machinery of power, leaving members of the Bush administration somewhat perplexed. They still wanted to believe President Bush that he had looked into Putin’s soul and found a fellow traveler. That was a poor reading of Putin’s persona and ambitions.
By 2007, political insiders in Russia were made aware Putin had no intention of relinquishing power when his second term as president elapsed in 2008.In fact he had a plan to retain power, thereby demonstrating that all along he had been a manipulative KGB “fox.” He announced he was willing to step down as president but would remain as prime minister. That would not, he insisted, erode the power of the next president. At the same time, he endorsed Medvedev as his successor with the words: “I have known him for 17 years and have worked closely with him during those years.”
In March 2008, Medvedev was elected president in a landslide victory and within months had established a set of principles to reshape the Russian Federation’s foreign policy. He made it clear he was committed to international law but at the heart of his policy was his conviction the world was multi polar. His use of the polarity terminology can best be explained like this.
During the Cold War there were two superpowers, creating a bi-polar world but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the dominant power, thereby making international relations uni-polar.
Medvedev now sees a multi-polar world, implying that the U.S. is in decline as a superpower and there is therefore no single, dominant force in the world. Instead, the U.S., Russia and the emerging powers such as India and China are economically interdependent. As a consequence, diplomacy and not military might should be the guiding feature of international relations. While some may argue that the placing of missiles along the Polish border and his threat to jam a US missile shield is hardly in keeping with Medvedev’s multi-polar philosophy, he will argue that his threats were related to another part of his foreign policy, namely his determination to defend Russia at any cost. Like Putin, he argues that a U.S. missile shield so close to Russian territory represents a threat because it will neutralize Russia’s military potential.
When Medvedev is not consumed by matters of state he spends as much time as he can with his wife and son. Like the president-elect of the United States, he also attends the gym every day and eats in his Moscow apartment. He has a cat and it is rumored he had it neutered because it fought constantly with a cat belonging to Mikhail Gorbachev, who lives in the same apartment building. He also has a tank of tropical fish and frequently listens to his collection of Western hard rock music. In February 2008, he attended a Deep Purple concert in Moscow.
In 2009, he may recognize in the new U.S. president many of his own intellectual qualities. However, he will discover he is dealing with a president who is his own man. That cannot be said about Medvedev while his mentor still sits at his shoulder, representing an old guard that never truly vanished from the scene after the fall of the Soviet empire. In putting the quiet, cool Petersburg lawyer into the top job, Putin attempted to put a pleasant face on Russian politics in an effort to obscure the fact that Cold War warriors like him are quietly tightening their grip on power. On the other hand, Medvedev is no slouch and may be waiting for the time when he can assert control over Russia’s future. There is the possibility he and Obama may find common ground on how to handle relations between their countries and how to defuse the tension that has built up over the Bush administration’s plans for installing a missile shield within sight of Russia’s borders.
There s one other scenario. Medvedev may step aside in 2009 and allow Putin to regain the presidency. That is not out of the question because the Russian parliament may be asked to change the constitution, allowing Putin to stand again for two terms of 6 years each in duration instead of the present 4.

ISRAEL'S POTENT ENEMY WITHIN

While Israel braces for violence from West Bank settlements, which it has allowed to expand in contravention of international agreements, the EU has privately warned its members to take action to halt the flow of settler-produced goods into European markets.
The potential threat of violence from Jewish settlers became apparent recently after fierce clashes between the Israeli police over what were called illegal outposts on the West Bank. There was also a warning by Yuval Diskin, head of the country’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, that there was a pressing danger the conflict with settlers could spiral out of control in coming months His remarks were made at a Cabinet meeting and led to speculation in news outlets that he thought extremists were planning to assassinate the prime minister or a leading political figure to make their case. It would not be the first time something like that has happened. A decade ago, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated because he was perceived to be a peacemaker.
Diskin was, however, quite specific that any future violence would be worse that anything that had preceded it because extremist settlers were not only well armed but were prepared to use violence to prevent any change in their status. His concerns were not only about the West Bank, where Israel has continued to flout international appeals to halt settlement expansion, but about the broader community of messianic Jewish settlement supporters throughout the country. Taking his views at face value, he was identifying a real problem in which Israel has what could be described as a heavily armed “militia” at the core of its society – a potent enemy within. The Shin Bet chief believes there are hundreds of extremists whom Shin Bet and the military may have to deal with.
All signs are that Israel has created a problem it may find difficult to resolve. From a security point of view, it has a large section of its police force already in the West Bank and does not have the capacity to send more. Its armed forces – the IDF – have border duties and in the past have shown a reluctance to deal effectively with settlement-based extremists. One solution would be to issue detention orders for the most dangerous extremists on security lists. The Knesset, the country’s ruling body, has refused to contemplate such a move even though it is happy to have over 700 Palestinians presently being held on detention orders.
On the settlement issue, the EU adopts a position the U.S. refuses to publicly support that Israel has broken promises it made to the international community at the Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland in November 2007. At the Annapolis summit, held to discuss a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, Israel agreed to halt all settlement building. In fact the wording of an agreement the Israeli delegation signed was that it would “freeze all settlement activity.” In the view of the EU, in the wake of Annapolis Israel has done the opposite of what it promised. Some EU politicians have even accused Israel of speaking out of both sides of its mouth.
In Britain, major retailers have been encouraged by government to carefully examine all goods marked West Bank because many of them are being produced in Jewish settlements and then labeled West Bank as if to indicate they are of Palestinian origin. The major retail outlet, Marks & Spencers no longer sells what are labeled West Bank goods. The British government is also at the center of an EU plan to curb settler exports as a means to deny settlements the money they need to exist. EU concerns about settler products began after investigations revealed that foods produced in Jewish settlements in the West Bank were flooding into European markets marked as “Israeli origin” in order to get round EU tariffs. It was a tactic designed to exploit trade arrangements between Israel and the EU.
The EU move to stop settler produce reaching European markets could affect the flow of genuine Israeli products and is an international embarrassment for the State of Israel. It also shows that Europe believes Israel is at fault and points up the fact that, if the EU can take steps to squeeze the economy of West Bank settlements, Israel could make similar moves if it so desired. Israel has responded to the latest EU moves by declaring it will hold diplomatic talks with the UK about the matter yet Britain is only one country pursuing an anti-settlement policy. As a whole, EU states agree that Israel has been duplicitous in its dealings with the international community over its handling of the settlement issue, an issue that may ultimately prove violent and costly for Israel.
The EU has also made it clear “in the strongest possible terms” that it condemns settler violence against ordinary Palestinians. It believes it is the moral duty of the Israel authorities to abide by their promises to the international community to resolve the settlement issue. So far, settlers have resorted to verbal threats and stone throwing attacks when attempts have been made to curb their assaults on Palestinians. But they have also made it clear they are willing to spill Israeli blood if any attempt is made to move them off Palestinian land. Some say the settlement issue is one Israel has refused to honestly address and that it has made matters worse in the Middle East by allowing settlement expansion while assuring the rest of the world that it has been pursuing a policy to ‘freeze all settlement activity.”
Now, it may have to deal with an enemy within that could be as dangerous as any outside threat it faces.