When you have a few minutes, don’t miss this Speigel Online interview with prominent Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Check out Solzhenitsyn’s overview of Russia’s political leaders since the fall of Communism:

Gorbachev’s administration was amazingly politically naÔve, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country. It was not governance but a thoughtless renunciation of power. The admiration of the West in return only strengthened his conviction that his approach was right. But let us be clear that it was Gorbachev, and not Yeltsin, as is now widely being claimed, who first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of our country.
Yeltsin’s period was characterized by a no less irresponsible attitude to people’s lives, but in other ways. In his haste to have private rather than state ownership as quickly as possible, Yeltsin started a mass, multi-billion-dollar fire sale of the national patrimony. Wanting to gain the support of regional leaders, Yeltsin called directly for separatism and passed laws that encouraged and empowered the collapse of the Russian state. This, of course, deprived Russia of its historical role for which it had worked so hard, and lowered its standing in the international community. All this met with even more hearty Western applause.
Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible — a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments.

Read the entire interview.

Senator Joe Lieberman’s hawkish comments from over the weekend regarding Iran received much media attention, but Gregory Scoblete in this TCS op-ed makes the case that Pakistan is actually the more toubling foreign policy problem:

While the 2008 presidential candidates are busy fielding questions about how they would confront Iran’s nuclear ambitions, few seem interested in addressing a much more pressing issue: Pakistan. [. . .]
The truth is Pakistan represents a far greater danger to the U.S. than Iran, at least for the foreseeable future. Let us count the ways. Pakistan is a nuclear power. Iran is not. Pakistan has a proven track record of proliferation, including a dalliance with al Qaeda. It was Pakistani nuclear scientists, after all, who met with bin Laden. Indeed, it was a Pakistani scientist, A. Q. Khan, whose black-market network significantly expanded the reach of nuclear equipment and know-how. Meanwhile, Iranian scientists are still laboring to master the basic elements of the nuclear fuel cycle (though progress continues).
Pakistan was one of three countries prior to 9/11 to recognize and provide significant material support to the Taliban – the one regime whose accommodation made 9/11 possible. Iran opposed the Taliban. Elements within the Pakistani military continue to support rump Taliban elements as they battle NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The New York Times reported that Pakistani army elements have gone so far as to directly fire on Afghan forces (though Pakistan denies it).
Ideologically, Pakistan is vastly more sympathetic to al Qaeda than Iran. Its religious schools preach the extremist variety of Sunni Islam that animates bin Laden’s jihad. While Iran’s Shiite theocrats preach “death to America,” few Iranians have actually embraced the mantra. There are, for instance, 65 Pakistanis in Guantanamo Bay; there are zero Iranians. Unlike al Qaeda, Iran’s Shiite proxy Hezbollah has not embraced mass-causality suicide terrorism against American civilian targets. Indeed, Hezbollah’s most significant anti-American strike was against a military target 24 years ago: a Marine barracks in Lebanon.
The single most important element, however, is the presence of a reconstituted al Qaeda leadership network in Pakistan. The country plays host (whether willingly or not) to the architects of the largest massacre on U.S. soil in history: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. In contrast, Iran reportedly harbors a small number of lesser al Qaeda figures.
In Senate testimony earlier this year, intelligence chief John Negroponte described Pakistan as a “secure hide-out” within which al Qaeda plots further carnage. In February, the New York Times reported that al Qaeda “had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan” including full-fledged terror training camps. In Waziristan, al Qaeda inhabits a failed state within a functioning, nuclear-armed one.
In sum, the danger to Americans in America is emanating principally from Pakistan, not Iran. . .

Read the entire article. Scoblete makes a compelling case.

Following on recent posts here and here on the seemingly intractable problems in Iraq, this David Carr/NY Times op-ed comments on the efforts of the U.S. military to control the publication of images of injured or killed soldiers from the Iraq War. Carr’s op-ed prompted this letter to the Times editor by University of Houston Professor Bill Monroe, who you may recall had the best line at the Memorial Service for the late Ross M. Lence. Professor Monroe’s letter provides as follows:

To the Editor:
ìNot to See the Fallen Is No Favor,î by David Carr (The Media Equation, May 28), suggests that the reigning assumption among leaders in Iraq is that we canít handle the truth. In a curious way, it may well be the duty of fallen soldiers to let us see them ó wounded, dying and dead.
If we have the temerity to ask them to risk life and limb protecting American interests, we must ask them to help us know what it looks like, what it feels like, so that we can decide, as a Republic and a people, whether we in fact want to exact that private and public cost.
ìIt is well,î Robert E. Lee is reported to have said, ìthat war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.î
We canít handle the truth? We had better.
William Monroe
Houston, May 30, 2007

Further in line with this sobering analysis from last week on the obstacles that U.S. Armed Forces face in training the Iraqi Army, Terry McCarthy — Baghdad correspondent for ABC News — provides this equally daunting report on day-to-day life in Baghdad:

Danger is everywhere in Baghdad; life here is a continuous series of risk assessments. From the moment people wake up, they have to check whether it is safe to leave the house. Is there an unusual amount of gunfire? Have strangers been seen driving through the neighborhood? Is there something new to be afraid of?
Anything out of the ordinary is cause for fear. A friend who lives in southwest Baghdad says a man recently parked a car on the main street across from his apartment block, then ran away. He was spotted by a butcher, who summoned a U.S. patrol. The troops cordoned off the area and defused what turned out to be a massive bomb inside the suspicious car. The brave butcher was taking a risk either way: He could have had his store blown up, but now he risks a bullet from insurgents for informing the Americans about the car.

Read the entire intriguing piece. And also this one on the status of the current U.S. “push” to stabilize Baghdad.

Regardless of one’s position on the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, this does not sound good:

Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents. [. . .]
But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomberís body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.
ìI thought, ëWhat are we doing here? Why are we still here?í î said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. ìWeíre helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.î [. . .]
On April 29, a Delta Company patrol was responding to a tip at Al Sadr mosque, a short distance from its base. The soldiers saw men in the distance erecting burning barricades, and the streets emptied out quickly. Then a militia, believed to be the Mahdi Army, which is affiliated with the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, began firing at them from rooftops and windows.
[Sgt. Kevin OíFlarity] and his squad maneuvered their Humvees through alleyways and side streets, firing back at an estimated 60 insurgents during a gun battle that raged for two and a half hours. . . .When the battle was over, Delta Company learned that among the enemy dead were at least two Iraqi Army soldiers that American forces had helped train and arm.

Read the entire troubling article.

Based on this Rolling Stone obituary, it’s a safe bet that the family of Boris Yeltsin will not be hiring Matt Tabbi to write the official biography of the late former Russian premier:

Boris Yeltsin was literally born in mud and raised in shit. He was descended from a long line of drunken peasants who in hundreds of years of non-trying had failed to escape the stinky-ass backwater of the Talitsky region, a barren landscape of mud and weeds whose history is so undistinguished that even the most talented Russian historians struggle to find mention of it in imperial documents. They did find Yeltsins here and there in the Czarist censuses, but until the 20th century none made any mark in history. The best of the lot turned out to be Boris’s grandfather, a legendarily mean and greedy old prick named Ignatiy Yeltsin, who achieved what was considered great wealth by village standards, owning a mill and a horse. Naturally, the flesh-devouring Soviet government, the government that would later make Boris Yeltsin one of its favored and feared vampires, liquidated Ignatiy for the crime of affluence, for the crime of having a mill and a horse. [. . .]
The communist government found its leaders among the meanest and greediest of the children who survived and thrived in places like this. Boris Yeltsin was such a child. As a teenager he only knew two things; how to drink vodka and smash people in the face. At the very first opportunity he joined up with the communists who had liquidated his grandfather and persecuted his father and became a professional thief and face-smasher, rising quickly through the communist ranks to become a boss of the Sverdlovsk region, where he was again famous for two things: his heroic drinking and his keen political sense in looting and distributing the booty from Soviet highway and construction contracts. If Boris Yeltsin ever had a soul, it was not observable in his early biography. He sold out as soon as he could and was his whole life a human appendage of a rotting, corrupt state, a crook who would emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze, concrete and sausage.

There is much more.

This New Yorker profile provides some interesting information on influential neo-con and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz and also on the work of the World Bank, which is not well-understood generally. Definitely recommended reading.
By the way, did you know that Wolfowitz taught himself Arabic in the 1980’s while working at the State Department, and that he also speaks French, German, Hebrew, and Indonesian?