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Russian Opposition To The War In Iraq

Introduction
The events of September 11 2001 were major events in the world. The United States ruled by George W. Bush decided to take revenge and launched what would be known as the war on terror. Russia has also declared the struggle against international terrorism as one of its top foreign policy priorities. Just one month after the collapse of the twin towers, the United States attacks Afghanistan to remove al-Qaeda forces and oust the Taliban regime. In a TV broadcast to the Russian people on 24 September 2001, Putin described the al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the US as "barbaric" (Kendall 2001: 161), and said 'Russia would provide all the information at its disposal about terrorist bases, and its secret services would co-operate fully with the west' (Sakwa 2004: 216). Also, Russia agreed to allow the US a presence in Central Asia (Donaldson and Nogee 2005: 360). The forms of US-Russia co-operation on Afghanistan were varied, including: pressure to force the Taliban, the country’s de facto government, to change its policies on terrorism and narcotics; UN sanctions; and a bilateral working group with a focus on terrorist threats coming from Afghanistan (Stepanova 2001). The main reason that led Russia to support the war in Afghanistan was that it hoped to increase its influence in Afghanistan and be in a better position to reduce the terrorist threat to Russia itself (Bowker 2007). However, when the United States decided to attack Iraq, Russia opposed the war. Putin made this choice for several reasons, and I will highlight the more important ones in this essay.
Russia and Iraq
Moscow's relations with Iraq were particularly close and complex (Bowker 2007). Baghdad had been a close ally of th e USSR since 1958, formalizing an ever closer relationship in 1972 when the Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation was signed. Economic and military ties remained close through the period even though diplomatic relations soured in the late 1970s as a result of the Ba’ath...