Whose Man in Prague?

I found the BBC report of Bush's speech in Prague interesting reading, having seen it shortly after I had finished reading Robert Cottrell's review of the last writing of Anna Politkovskaya, now translated into English and published under the title A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia. Bush had already briefed the press in preparation for his visit to Sofia, but there was apparently no preparation for his plan to use Prague as the site for a shot across the bow aimed directly at Putin. Here is the key sentence from Bush's text:

In Russia, reforms that once promised to empower citizens have been derailed, with troubling implications for democratic development.

Politkovskaya, of course, had been following this derailing process for many years, even before Bush had decided, after his first meeting with Putin, that the two of them were soul-mates. The irony is the some of Politkovskaya's most trenchant impressions of Putin could well apply to Bush and his administration with little, if any, warping.

Consider, as a first example, a text that applies not directly to Putin but to one of his appointees, Ramzan Kadyrov, named deputy prime minister of Chechnya. See if the following passage carries a certain resonance with Bush's "deputies" in both Iraq and Guantanamo:

The rules that apply to other people do not apply to Ramzan. He can do as he pleases because he is said to be fighting terrorists using his own methods. In fact he's fighting nobody. He is in the business of robbery and extortion, disguised as "the fight against terrorism."

Consider next this capsule description of Putin in light of the "presentation of self" that Rove has engineered for Bush:

He is an excellent imitator. When need be, he is one of you; when that is not necessary, he is your enemy.

Remember all the charm that was exuded at Bush's first meeting with Pelosi, now gone with the snows of yesteryear? In her earlier book, Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, Politkovskaya had even sharper word along the same lines:

I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that.

We might learn a lot about conditions in this country from a close reading of Politkovskaya's dispatches from post-Communist Russia. However, to open his piece, Cottrell drew on another source that turned out to be just as prescient. The text was from "Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism;" and, for those who do not recognize the title, the author was Mussolini. Here is the sentence that Cottrell quoted:

The Fascist State organises the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possible harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.

Think about your current state of affairs as you read that sentence, and then think about the context of who was writing about what!