LA PLUS CA CHANGE?…

The atmospherics surrounding Ivanov’s visit, if anything, overshadowed the details of the two sides’ discussions. By any measure, the Russian defense minister’s appearance on “Meet the Press” was a public relations coup. Ivanov demonstrated his impressive command of English–declaring, for example, Bush as a “visionary man” who “understands that the … Cold War is definitely over”–and his even more uncanny knowledge of Michael Jordan’s career. (Russert gave him a Washington Wizards jersey). Ivanov even showed talent as a straight man, when the “Meet the Press” host showed him archival news clip of Joseph McCarthy and asked: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” “I have been,” smiled the KGB veteran, who was expelled from the United Kingdom on spying charges in 1983 while working at the Soviet embassy in London. To which Russert marveled: “How the world has changed.”

Russert went easy on certain issues Ivanov may have preferred to avoid. Chechnya, for example, was only mentioned twice in the interview: Russert referred to “the absolute proof” Moscow says it has that Osama bin Laden “trained many of the terrorists that are now operating in Chechnya” while Ivanov claimed “many” of those terrorists are “now in hiding, either in Chechnya or in Pankisi Gorge in Georgia.” The issue of the human rights situation there was not broached, even though the U.S. State Department had just released its annual human rights report, which called the Russian government’s record in Chechnya “poor,” said federal security forces had shown “little respect for basic human rights” in the breakaway republic and alleged that both the federal and rebel forces had carried out extrajudicial killings. It would have been interesting to see Ivanov’s reaction to the State Department report, given the statement he made last year that he “could understand” the behavior of Colonel Yury Budanov, the Russian tank commander on trial for abducting and murdering a Chechen girl, “under the circumstances.” (Just last week, Chechen officials reported that a local police officer who had participated in Budanov’s arrest and was a witness in his trial, which is ongoing, was murdered in Chechnya by unidentified gunmen.)