Russia and Iran

I wondered what Russia got out of supporting Assad in Syria, except maybe those two big bases in Syria.  When Russia started bombing it was to target ISIS and help get rid of these terrorists who are disliked by almost everybody, but still survive.  Only they didn't bomb ISIS;  they attacked the enemies of Assad instead.  That makes sense if you want to keep those bases and believe that Assad is the only one who can say you can stay.  Bombing ISIS can be done later.  They seemed to be using the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but that requires going back in recent history to figure out who the enemy really is.

In my last book, I used the example of the Iran-Iraq war as a symbol for the proxy wars fought by Russia and the U.S./allied forces.  That didn't run out well for the U.S. But, it seems to have worked out well for the Russians who backed a winner.  In an area where nothing is simple, this may have been too easy an explanation.

Oil and gas seem to be involved here too, and the oil markets respond to both good and bad news in the Middle East.  As Iran was about to go on-line with its oil sales, Saudi Arabia was cutting back on its internal largess because of sinking oil prices.  The U.S. began to sell oil again because it had so much.  Those were trends that nobody in the oil sector would like.  Russia and the United States are not enemies there.

Religion is an issue too, and I naturally thought since the United States and Russia were both Christian countries, they would be at least neutral in this area.  Then I read Al Jazeera's story on the number of Muslims in Moscow and the great lengths they have to go to get to their prayers [http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/07/animosity-moscow-muslims-change-city-150720093306298.html ]. In a city of 12 million, there are a million Muslims.  In contrast, Pew Research says there are less than 1% overall in the United States and less than 2% in Washington D.C.  [ http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/muslim/ ].  There are almost as many Buddhists as Muslims living here.  

I read a paper, "Russia and Iran: An Anti-Western Alliance?" on how these two countries have again come together as allies in an alliance that is based more on the needs of dictatorships (an economy based on oil and gas sales to countries that are not exactly friendly towards them, religious justification for their manner of ruling, and absolute power over their populations) than the practical necessity of an alliance against a common enemy in the West.  [ Abbas Milani is the head of Iranian studies at Stanford and a research fellow at the Hudson Institute.  You can read his paper at http://web.stanford.edu/~amilani/downloads/CurrentHistory1.pdf ]

If you look around at the countries that are dictatorships (I include China in that number), there are a lot of similarities between the governments' justification for holding onto their positions.  Assad, Putin, Khomeini, Xi, Castro, have totally different policies for religion in their countries, economic assets, and natural resources, but they all have one thing in common - they control their populations by intimidation, sometimes crudely applied.  They define the limits of freedom of expression.  They claim they are elected to power and remain by the will of the people, but limit that will by controlling information.  No wonder they fear the democracies of the world, their one real enemy.