Camp David daydream

This Thursday and Friday, President Bush will host Russian President Vladimir Putin at the presidential retreat in Camp David. Let's pretend that Bush isn't just trying to get Putin to support a new U.N. resolution on Iraq to ease the burden of the U.S. occupation.\nInstead, pretend Bush takes his commitment to American democratic ideals seriously. If that were so, Bush would have a different agenda.\nFor example, during Putin's sleepover, Bush might mention Russia's continuing war against Chechen separatists.\nSince Putin invaded Chechnya in 1999, more than 6,000 Russian troops have died. An unknown, but towering, number of Chechens have been killed. Even more have been wounded or left homeless. Putin has justified his actions by pointing to the Chechen rebels. He calls them terrorists. Many probably are.\nYet Putin's scorched-earth tactics aren't winning. Between 25,000 and 40,000 Russian troops remain in Chechnya, with orders to shoot without warning (The New York Times, Thursday). According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Russia is the most heavily mined place in the world. Nearly 6,000 Chechens died from landmines in 2002 alone.\nThe New York Times, rarely home to impassioned writing, called the conflict an "unending, unwinnable, horribly destructive war" and blamed the Kremlin for "four years of slaughter."\nPutin's Chechnya policy is a human rights violation at least as grave as Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds. But Bush has been slow to condemn these lapses, possibly to repay Russia's support for the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan. \nOf course, it's hard to base U.S. foreign policy on morality -- including our occupation of Iraq -- if we turn a blind eye to our sometime-ally's massacres. Double standards are morally corrosive. And I'm not the first to notice this.\nObviously, there are other problems in Russia. The country's criminal justice system is a holdover from Soviet days. Moscow held its first jury trial since the Bolshevik revolution just last month. Conviction rates for accused criminals exceed 99.5 percent (Washington Post, Sept. 2) -- meaning that either Russia's police and prosecutors are supernaturally good at getting their man, or that there's something rotten in the state of Putin.\nThis summer, observers were unanimous that the Kremlin was behind the prosecution of Yukos Oil, Russia's biggest, most influential company. Students of Russian politics saw the company's plight as a favor from Putin to a Yukos competitor, the Times said. Political interference in the country's economy is commonplace and unhealthy.\nThese problems are, in some ways, the least of Russia's worries. There's also the country's short life expectancy, high infant mortality, rampant crime and host of other problems.\nSuch disorder is worrying because Russia isn't an ordinary, chaos-ridden country. It's still a major nuclear power, with huge stocks of uranium and plutonium. It has vast stores of chemical and biological weapons, and its condition makes those very real weapons of mass destruction more likely to fall into terrorists' hands. \nIn another scenario, a strong man, perhaps Putin himself, might convince Russians that the only way to restore order is to return to the dark days of the U.S.S.R.\nSome of them won't need much convincing. A recent survey of Russian adults -- published by the Washington Post (Aug. 16) -- found nearly 26 percent of Russians would "definitely" or "probably" vote for Josef Stalin for president. \nPutin's policies are making those scenarios more likely.\nBush could bring up these issues and express the White House's hopes that Putin embraces democracy and at least some protections of human rights.\nI can dream.\nOne thing is certain: after his first meeting with the Russian leader, President Bush said he had looked into Putin's soul.\nIt's time to look again.