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Stage One of the project focused on gathering

The club used the “scenario planning” technique to pearl jewelry develop various possibilities for Russia, setting the time frame of 10 to 15 years into the future. It found a successful example of this work in the “Scenarios for South Africa” project. That project helped the opposing parties and peoples of South Africa agree on resolutions and compromises to their most critical issues, allowing them to avoid further political aggravation and possible civil war. It was the intense discussion of South Africa’s possible development options that to a considerable extent facilitated the final agreement and peaceful transfer of power there.

Stage One of the project focused on gathering data on all key factors, forces and trends as well as major uncertainties that might be significant for Russia’s development in the next 10 to 15 years. The data came from a series of 25 interviews with experts and individuals with a systemized vision of events, who could give a well-argued description and forecast of the situation.

A Scenario Group was then formed, made up of prominent economists, social and political analysts, historians, corporate CEOs from small, medium and large businesses, state officials, political figures and public activists, journalists, writers, cinema directors and political talk-show hosts from various television stations.

Stage Two saw the Scenario Group hold three discussions in three months to outline three scenarios using the data available from stage one. Each outline had to have a visible relationship to the main elements, with a possibility to forecast the consequences of any significant event.

Stage Three took place after the Scenario Group’s work was over. A team of well-known writers and journalists used the outlines provided to write three stories, giving a captivating description of the possible course of events in Russia over the next 15 years.

 The Mega-Serbia Scenario (“The Poisoned Rake”)

Russia fails to wholesale pearl jewelry contain its national depression, both economic and psychological, which leads it into the trap of imperial nationalism.

 The Slow but Certain Scenario (“Tale of Time Lost”)

Russia makes use of the favorable global economic environment to reverse the trend of a deteriorating standard of living for the population and overcomes the economic depression but loses its chance of returning to the global elite due to misguided priorities.

 The New Social Deal Scenario (“The Renaissance”)

Russia realizes the degeneration of the existing social structure and manages to find adequate solutions for all challenges by focusing on reforming the system of power.

The Scenarios for Russia project was not an attempt to predict Russia’s future. “A tale is tall but gives a hint to the wise,” is the project initiators’ motto.

The authors sought primarily to convey their scenarios’ logic to those who can seriously influence the election through their deliberate political choice. The people involved in “Scenarios for Russia” do not have a strong political background, nor is the project related to gemstone necklace a specific political organization - it is an initiative of a group of citizens and public institutions. Its participants are concerned with the present lack of positive concepts for the country’s future and believe that defining such concepts would be a serious prerequisite for Russian society to overcome its present crisis.

Vladimir Pozner will produce a six-part TV show titled “The Time and Us,” focusing on the Scenarios for Russia project and talking to audiences in six Russian cities: Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Tver, Veliky Novgorod and Moscow. ORT will broadcast the program in November and December this year.

It has become eminently clear that Russia

With the voluntary help of politically correct CNN and BBC, the terrorists’ propaganda arm, TV company Al-Jazeera, has been inciting hatred toward the West in the Muslim world with well-honed professionalism. Scenes of destruction and victims of the bombing have interchanged with hours-long appeals by Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar to pearl jewelry annihilate the infidels.

The leaders of moderate Muslim states have called on the United States to end the bombing and the whole anti-terrorist operation. More cautious statements in the same direction have come from a number of European NATO member states following a wave of anti-globalization demonstrations in European capitals.

But if the allies wind up their operations and leave Central Asia, this would mean political humiliation for the United States and Great Britain and de-facto capitulation to the terrorists. At the same time, it would pose a mortal threat to the C.I.S. countries in Central Asia. Russia would not be able to deal with this threat on its own because all its combat-ready units are stuck in Chechnya.

Tensions have increased sharply on the domestic political scene in Russia. The political “elite’s” dissatisfaction with President Vladimir Putin’s choice has become more and more overt.

It has become eminently clear that Russia has joined a coalition that could lose, and that has already lost the propaganda war. Some of the politicians who publicly burned their Communist Party cards in 1991 have already demonstratively had themselves circumcised live on TV political-analysis shows.

The fast-growing “Scythians of Russia” political movement has put forward a radical program – “Through our narrow eyes, we watch the mortal battle rage from afar.” The time has come for the Kremlin to freshwater pearl jewelry make its final choice.

After an all-night Security Council meeting in November, with breaks only for telephone conversations with Washington and London, the Kremlin announces that George W. Bush and Tony Blair are flying to Moscow the next day. Putin personally meets them at the airport and they drive straight to the Kremlin. A few hours later, the resulting Moscow Declaration is made public:

“We, the leaders of Great Britain, Russia and the United States, having discussed the new challenges to global security in the 21st century, conclude that we share fundamental long-term political and military-strategic interests.

“Our nations are committed to the values of freedom, democracy, the value of the individual, security and social justice.

“At an hour when the forces of world evil are challenging these values, we are conscious of the responsibility we hold toward our peoples and the world community to eradicate international terrorism.

“We therefore request our governments to prepare as soon as possible the text of a Treaty on Military-Political Union between Great Britain, Russia and the United States and introduce it to potato pearl our national parliaments. The treaty’s central provision will concern the mutual commitments of our three countries to defend our citizens’ security, our territorial integrity and the inviolability of our borders.

This was a small issue surrounding

Given the increasingly hereditary nature of the American succession and the obviously tsarist leanings of the current First Face, this kind of imagery ought to be very striking to the casual or even the professional observer.

But the only registered blip on the media radar screen was an explanation in Izvestia that the meeting had to pearl jewelry be done there because of some strange issue involving an airstrip:

“About 10 days later, State Department officers set off for Russia’s Northwest to find a place for the U.S. president’s plane to land. Nothing was found close to St. Petersburg. But, ultimately, Tsarskoye Selo was a spot perfectly suitable for a ‘royal’ agenda.”

This was a small issue surrounding the summit. Some of the larger ones went completely unreported, at least in the American press.

Most of those, from where I sat, involved the final negotiations over Russia’s asking price or support for the recent bogus U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq – clearly the central focus of these meetings. Aside even from the obvious idiocies in our Iraq war coverage – the sudden media concern with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction some 15 years after Hussein used such weapons, with our support, against Iran – there have been a number of extremely bizarre features of our wartime media mobilization. Not the least of these have been the surprisingly frank public discussions about the actual reasons for the war, held simultaneously with the utterly fraudulent “official” explanations for the attack.

It is not unusual in the States these days to see a major network run sober reports about Iraqi secret weapons sites and then, minutes later, run an in-depth feature about Iraqi oil and the eventual carving up of the petro-spoils among the postwar victors.

This schizophrenic approach was demonstrated most graphically recently by the Microsoft/NBC/Newsweek/ Washington Post conglomerate, which has created an entire full-length feature series, run on its MSNBC network, entitled: “Oil: The Other Iraq War.” In it, the network – which in its day job runs the usual “Weapons Inspectors Arrive in Iraq” schlock as the meat of its “straight” coverage of the war – reports at length about the energy motives behind the attack.

A recent piece called “Oil After Saddam: All Bets Are In” put the matter succinctly:

“The American campaign to blister pearl overthrow Iraqi President Sad-dam Hussein, even as al-Qaida’s terrorism thrives around the world and the national economy falters, has many people in America and abroad asking: What’s really motivating Washing-ton to take on Saddam?”

The answer, the network concludes, is oil. And, for the rest of this “Other War” coverage, MSNBC reports on the upcoming conflict with more-or-less total candor, explaining the rewards the United States will reap when it takes control of the world’s second-largest oil reserves, etc.

The whole thing leaves one with the odd impression that the media is actually covering two completely different wars: One, the fake one to fictionally disarm a fake dangerous sponsor of international terrorism, and the “other war,” the actual one.

The coverage of the first war is suitably fake; the coverage of the second war, because it is real, is suitably real.

The phenomenon reminds me a lot of a book called “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst,” about a sailor who once tried to fake a single-handed circumnavigation of the globe. Crowhurst went insane during the voyage and, after a short while, began to keep two separate captain’s logs.

The first was the fake one, for posterity, which depicted the captain in all sorts of heroic poses, eating flying fish and composing lyrical descriptions of sunsets as he conquered the raging waters off Cape Horn.

The second log was the real one, intended for use by Crowhurst himself, where he described his actual location floating aimlessly a few hundred miles from the starting port in England, wondering aloud how to freshwater pearl work his compass and fretting over the likelihood that he will be found out when he returns home.

There are so many disturbing parallels to the Iraq coverage here that it boggles the mind, especially when you consider that in the Crowhurst story the two-log system only made sense to an insane person who eventually jumped overboard to his death following a complete mental short-out. We lay consumers of the wartime media may yet suffer the same fate.

That said, it is obvious that the American media is not yet completely comfortable with the two-war model. If it had been, some of the news from the recent Bush-Putin summit would have been reported differently. For instance: Just as Bush was meeting with Putin, the United States announced that it was going to expand its quota for imported slab steel from Russia.

Last year, to great fanfare and international outcry, the allegedly anti-protectionist Bush administration slapped 30-percent tariffs on imported slab steel, limiting Russia to 1 million metric tons of imports. Last week, it expanded that number to 1.3 million metric tons.

If, like most thinking people, you heard a distinct cash-register “kerching!” sound coming from the general direction of the Kremlin when Putin signed off on the U.N. Iraq resolution, you might naturally think that deals like this would be the form the payoff would come in.

After all, Russia’s steel barons are major patrons of the Putin regime, and Putin’s first order of business in gouging the United States would normally be the securing of a bone to throw in their direction.

But this obvious quid pro quo was not detected in the coverage either of the summit or the deal. Indeed, not a single news outlet has even suggested a connection.

Worse still, Izvestia reported that Bush and Putin came to wholesale pearl jewelry a “gentlemen’s agreement” about Russia’s share of the oil booty following the war. Aside from a write-up on the BBC’s online service, this, too, went unreported.

superpower trappings

Leaving aside Russian diplomats, let’s come back to cultured pearl U.S. politicians. No matter who is in the White House, NMD is on the agenda in some way.

Former President Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration took steps toward developing an NMD under pressure from the Republican majority in Congress. The Republican administration feels genuine ideological enthusiasm for NMD, while the Clinton administration spent several years sincerely and persistently trying to persuade the Russian side to accept modifications to the provisions of the ABM Treaty that place restrictions on NMD systems.

It’s possible that Russia’s monotonous repetition of its ABM mantra – which drove Clinton negotiators to desperation – was a demonstration of Moscow’s diplomatic wisdom. Moscow understood the issue thoroughly, but wanted to wait until after the U.S. presidential election in order to conclude an advantageous agreement with the winner.

The problem is that the official Russian position hasn’t become any more flexible since the Republicans came to power. What’s more, and this is significant, since Jan. 20, 2001, no one has been trying to persuade us of anything. Formally, the official American position remains unchanged – Russia is invited to enter negotiations on modifying the ABM Treaty.

But a significant and influential part – if not the whole – of the Bush administration doesn’t want the ABM Treaty modified. This concerns above all Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his supporters. They would rather see the United States withdraw completely from the treaty (which they can do as long as they give six-month notice). This would leave their hands free to silver pearl necklace pursue their plans. It’s not even the military aspect of this scenario that interests them so much as the political outcome, which would put Russia outside any serious strategic agreements and deprive it of its last superpower trappings.

Rumsfeld left a security conference in Munich without even staying to hear Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov’s reply and without bothering to debate with him. This was not just because he already knew what Ivanov would say but also because Ivanov’s position suited him just fine.

For Russia, fighting to prevent modification of the ABM Treaty amounts to fighting to give the United States a free hand to deploy NMD. It also means fighting to push Russia out of its prestigious and genuinely significant seat in the club of nuclear superpowers, bound together by a system of agreements. And it means fighting to exclude the Russian military- industrial complex from the promising market in cutting-edge military technology.

What worries Rumsfeld more than anything is that Russia will pull out of this fight that has already driven our diplomacy into a dead end and will take up a reasonable position that actually meets our interests. But after so many years of rhetorical gymnastics and pumping up Russian public opinion, it’s not so easy for the country’s diplomats to retreat to dancing pearl a more constructive position without losing face.

Ian George Stopford Harrison was born in Salford in 1931