Dual frustration: America, Russia and the Persian Gulf.

• Author: Sestanovich, Stephen
• Position: Quarterly

IRAN AND IRAQ loom larger than ever in Russian-American relations. At a time when the number of issues on which Moscow and Washington disagree is dwindling, these two are still contentious enough--despite Russia's "yes" vote in the UN Security Council on November 8--that officials and commentators on each side regularly suspect the other of ill will and bad faith.

It's not a new problem. Long before President Bush found Iraq and Iran to be part of an "axis of evil", they were already the subject of acrimonious exchanges between Moscow and Washington. American policymakers have frequently asked their Russian counterparts how they can expect to maintain friendly relations with the United States and with states that support terrorism, threaten American friends, and violate their own international commitments by seeking weapons of mass destruction.

Worse, Americans accuse Russia of helping Iraq and Iran. When Russian diplomats shielded Iraq from international pressure in the late 1990s, Madeleine Albright used to call them "Saddam's lawyers." And the US. government continues to believe that Iran's effort to build nuclear weapons and long-range missiles gets a boost from Russian technology and expertise. This is no minor irritation: the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by regimes deeply hostile to our interests has become America's pre-eminent national security concern, and Russian policies that make it harder for the United States to address this concern are not easy to ignore.

The extraordinary near-alliance forged by President Bush and President Putin after September 11, 2001, ought to help the two sides to work together on these issues. But the legacy they must overcome is daunting. The United States, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, has raised Iran and Iraq with the Russians over many years, when relations were good and when they were shaky. It has treated them as matters of the highest priority and as everyday diplomatic nuisances. It has sometimes offered to pay a high price for resolving them, at other times no price at all. Russia's response to all this has changed little over time. It has usually resisted putting pressure on either country, and only rarely restricted its relations with them. While expressing hope that neither will acquire nuclear weapons, it has usually betrayed a kind of fatalism about the outcome.

As we face the prospect of another Persian Gulf war a closer look at the past is in order, if only to understand why years of American effort have not gotten us the results we sought. Renewed confrontation with Iraq may actually create an opportunity for Russia and the United States to put this disagreement behind them for good. (Washington has already offered Moscow more substantial inducements to cooperate than ever before.) Success may open up a chance for a breakthrough on Iran, as well. But none of this will come to pass if the United States does not give the Russians a better sense of what its tolerances are and how our relations are likely to develop if we cannot cooperate. Otherwise, the Bush-Putin partnership could become an inadvertent casualty of war.

Iraq, the Last Time Around

SINCE THE Persian Gulf War, Russia and the United States have played out their disagreements over Iraq largely within the UN Security Council. Here the war of 1991 gained an international mandate, peace terms were laid down, and disputes about enforcing them took shape.

These disputes were at their peak between 1997 and 1999, when Saddam Hussein challenged the UN inspection system created at the end of the war to deny Iraq weapons of mass destruction. After two years of confrontation, inspectors of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) were ousted from Iraq, and UNSCOM itself was forced to disband. Its much weaker successor, UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission), was not even able to enter Iraq. (1)

The Iraqis would not have been able to overthrow the UN disarmament regime but for divisions among the permanent members of the Security Council. From 1997 on, whenever Iraq sought to dilute UNSCOM's authority, replace its leadership, change the composition of its staff or restrict its activities inside Iraq, it enjoyed consistent Russian support. Moscow insisted that Iraq had gone far to meet UN disarmament requirements and deserved to know that intrusive inspections would soon give way to less onerous "monitoring" and eventually to a frill lifting of economic sanctions.

Two motives appeared to guide Russian policy. The first was political--to constrain U.S. actions, preserve Russian authority, keep the Iraq question in the Security Council and maximize U.S. isolation if Washington acted unilaterally. The second motive was economic--to reap the material benefits of being Iraq's chief protector against American pressure.

Russian success was significant, but incomplete. The confrontation between Iraq and UNSCOM was punctuated in December 1998 by four days of British and American bombing, which Moscow could neither prevent nor counter. Nor did Russian support free Baghdad from the UN sanctions regime and indirect regulation of the Iraqi economy. Yet even this halfway result brought Moscow substantial benefits. The United States and Britain punished Saddam, but they did not take Iraq off the Security Council agenda. Indeed, once the bombing stopped, their diplomats went back to negotiating UNMOVIC's mandate. Russia's veto continued to give it influence with both sides. On the economic front, Russia profited handsomely from the continuing standoff. The oil-for-food program, created in 1996 to help the Iraqi people, perpetuated UN oversight of Iraqi trade; but because it allowed Iraq to choose its partners, it was an effective tool with which to reward Russia for its support. Between 1997 and 2000 Russian-Iraqi trade quintupled.

Saddam offered Russia even larger pay-offs down the road. At the beginning of its campaign against UNSCOM, Iraq signed a major exploration and development contract (valued at around $12 billion) with the Russian oil company LUKoil. Unlike increased trade, of course, these benefits could only be realized if sanctions were lifted; the same was true of Russia's desire to collect its $7-8 billion in Iraqi state debts. Both gave Moscow further reasons to keep pressing for an end to sanctions.

In the late 1990s, accumulating Russian-American disagreements stoked a conviction on both sides that meaningful cooperation, not to mention real partnership, could not last. As one of the most important issues on which the two sides disagreed, Iraq was part of this downward trend. Yet what is striking about the evolution of Russian-American relations in this period is how limited the impact of Iraq turned out to be. American officials wanted to keep discord over Iraq from having negative side effects; they called this "managing our differences", and considered it a mark of maturity in Russian-American relations. Russia, too, clearly wanted to avoid paying a price in American enmity for the support it gave Saddam.

Domestic politics provides part of the explanation for Iraq's...