Playing the Angles: Russian diplomacy before and during the war in Iraq

Abstract

In the lead-up to and during the American-led intervention in Iraq this year, the Putin administration had several goals: - To work in partnership with other nations, especially France and Germany, to prevent the United States from acting unilaterally, to create a "multipolar" world in order to prevent American intervention in the first place, and (when this tailed) to prevent the United States (along with the United Kingdom) from determining Iraq's future without U.N. Security Council approval. - To work in partnership with the United States, especially in the wake of 9/11, against terrorism and in pursuit of common security, and economic goals. - To finally cash in on the contracts that Russian oil firms and other enterprises had signed with the Saddam Hussein regime (and as many as possible of those that were initialed or just discussed) after it was ousted and U.N. Security Council sanctions were lifted. - To preserve the contracts Russia had gained under the U.N. Security Council's oil-for-food program in post-Saddam Iraq. - To finally collect the $8 billion in Saddamera Iraqi debt owed to Moscow. - To prevent events in Iraq from damaging Russia economically and from hurting the Putin administration politically. Some of these goals contradict each other. In this paper. I will examine two questions: To what extent did Russia achieve each of these goals (and to what extent does it seem likely to)? And how successfully did Russia resolve the contradictions among these goals?