Russia, according to the same source, controls 5.8 percent of Iraq's total imports. From 1981-2001, however, Russia supplied 50 percent of Iraq's arms imports. Under the oil-for-food program, Russian trade with Iraq amounts to an estimated $500 million to $1 billion. A Soviet-era debt to Iraq of about $7 billion to $8 billion, generated by arms sales during the Iran-Iraq war, is still outstanding. And Russian oil and gas companies have contracts to service and develop sites throughout Iraq, with a $40 billion economic agreement between Iraq and Russia reportedly having been signed in 2002 to allow oil exploration in western Iraq.</font>

And as for Germany, I'll bet dollars to donuts that we uncover some shady sales of banned WMD equipment to the Iraqi government.

I suppose these countries thought that by spreading the load amongst the three of them, that they could somehow soften the repercussions of a veto. They are living in cloudcuckooland.

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This essay addresses the future of the geopolitical world as the struggle to integrate "The Core" nations, that is, those well along the path of globalization, with those of "The Gap," those nations that are isolated, disconnected from the rest of the world.

A sample graf:

"Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap."

The Bad News seems to be that no nation other than the US currently has either the will or the economic means to do much to aid in the integration of the Gap into the Core. So far as the military capability, I tend to doubt that we will ever even have enough boots on the ground to do it, without recruiting the US versions of the Legion Etrangere or the Khyber Rifles for the grunt security work.

It will necessarily be a chore that will consume a generation or two in the doing. The problem is that the American people have been notoriously devoid of long term vision. We will live in interesting times.

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