Cheney: looking for oil in all the wrong places.
Topic: Bush Administraiton

Dick Cheney is stirring up a whole bunch of dust during his present "oil tour '06." On Thursday, he accused the Russians of using their energy resources to blackmail other countries and re-impose authoritarian rule at home. Just to make sure the Russians got the message, Cheney chose to tell the Russians to 'go fuck themselves' at a conference of pro-Western former Soviet republics in Lithuania.

Nice work Trigger Finger! The reaction from the government of Russia has been muted so far, but there are rumblings of the Kremlin not being very happy about the speech, to put it mildly. Vladimir Isachenkov of the AP reports that some in Russia are likening the speech to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain” speech. Isachenkov writes that, "the prominent business daily Komersant said Cheney's comments marked 'the beginning of a second Cold War.'"

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the guy that we're counting on to convince the Iranians to play ball with us, explained the Russian mood like this:

"Over the past years, many forums have been created that reflect the desire of the respective states...to pool their efforts to achieve common benefits. But there are forums that create an impression...that they are convened...for the sake of uniting against someone." Where would he ever get an idea like that? Gosh, the Russians are so paranoid.

Just because Cheney then moved on to Kazakhstan to convince Nursultan Nazarbayev to build pipelines that bypass Russia and go directly to the West shouldn't give the Russians the idea that we're up to no good. So we have a few military bases in Central Asia and we're parked on their southern border with 130,000 troops and we're training troops in Georgia...what's the big deal? Surely they're not feeling slightly hemmed in by us, are they?

While Cheney had some tough words for the authoritarian tendencies of Vlad "the Impaler" Putin, it was all puppies and kittens for Nazarbayev. Before he even met with a delegation of opposition leaders ---some of whom weren't able to make it because the government wouldn't let them travel --- Cheney was saying of Nazarbayev's dictatorial rule:

"I have previously expressed my admiration for what has transpired here in Kazakhstan over the past fifteen years, both in terms of economic development as well as political development."

Indeed, Nazarbayev just got voted back into office for the third time for other six-years with 91% of the vote. (Those are Ilham Aliyev numbers.) That's quite a bit of political development...for him. But we're not really too concerned about Nazarbayev being a serial election fixer, Kazakhstan is right in between Russian and China and they're slated to be pumping 3m barrels of oil a day by 2015. We're going to just quietly urge him to give up power eventually or just turn the reins of power over to his son at some point down the road.

One of Kazakhstan's opposition leaders, Oraz Jandosov, of the Democratic Party of Kazakhstan, who was to meet with Cheney for an hour said, "We're going to try to explain deplorable situation in this country. After Cheney's speech yesterday (in Lithuania), it will be difficult for him to be unsympathetic to us." [NYT]

How sad...if this poor sucker only knew!