Russia-Middle East connection. (The Last Word).

Do you drive a car or heat your home? Then you undoubtedly have had at least a few fleeting anxious thoughts since September 11th about how the war on terror and the escalating turmoil in the Middle East will affect gas pump prices and the family energy budget. That's understandable; our country's unnatural dependence on foreign energy has made each of us to some degree hostage to events in far-off lands.

In the bad old days of the Evil Empire, Americans generally understood that one of the top reasons the Kremlin strategists targeted the Middle East was to control the West's oil supplies. Thus, the Soviets expended immense efforts (including mountains of armaments, oceans of rubles, and armies of military advisers) to establish surrogate terrorist regimes in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, and Algeria, and to build "independent" actors such as the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.

What a difference a few short years can make! Now Russia is our partner in the war on terror and, according to the November 11th edition of The New York Times, President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that "Russia, the world's second -largest oil producer, stands ready to ensure the West's energy security in the event of war or disruption in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf." Mr. Putin even signed on to U.S. use of military bases in the Central Asian states of Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Kazakhstan to aid the fight against al-Qaeda-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Pardon me for raining on a very big parade, but for some reason a line from a cautionary children's poem keeps coming to mind: "'Come into my parlor,' said the spider to the fly." We are already far into the sticky, entangling web; if we do not soon extricate ourselves, we will become fatally entrapped.

While the world's attention was fixed on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, events far less noticed, though every bit as important, were taking place that may radically alter the global economic, energy, and security pictures. The oppressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan has been replaced by an interim government composed of terrorists from the Russian- and Iranian-backed Northern Alliance, leaving the Moscow strategists to call the shots in Kabul, but in a more covert fashion than during their previous military occupation of the country.

The new Moscow-Tehran-Kabul axis takes on great significance when viewed in connection with the larger picture of Russian moves in the Transcaucusus, Caspian, Middle East, and Indian Ocean regions. In all these moves, the Russian-backed Marxist-Islamic regime in Iran has been a critically important partner. Ditto for the so-called Muslim regimes in Russia's puppet states of Central Asia.

Following in the footsteps of Team Clinton, Team Bush is proceeding to turn over this immense, strategically vital region of the world to Russian hegemony. You may think the world of Big Oil is irredeemably corrupt under the evil influence of the corporate "Seven Sisters" (Exxon, BP, Shell, etc.), but do you expect less corruption under a global energy domain dictated by a Russian-led "Seven Brothers"? That is where we are headed, with ESSO, Aramco, and Standard Oil to be supplanted by Russo, Iranco, and the five Stan Brothers: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, and Turkmenistan.

The Stan Brothers are still Communist dictatorships run, respectively, by Nursultan Nazarbayev, Emomali Rahmonov, Islam Karimov, Askar Akayev, and Saparamat Niyazov. All five are lifelong, hard-core Reds, serving the Party leaders in Moscow since Brezhnev, or even back to Khrushchev or Stalin. Russia, Iran, and the Stans have been working in concert to undermine and subvert moderate governments and to gain control of the entire region. At the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and other institutions, they have formed a formidable network of support. And they have formed increasingly warm bilateral relations with moderate Arab states that formerly shunned Soviet overtures. This all appears to have the unreserved blessing of our State Department. In fact, our tax dollars continue to pour into Russia and the Stans through U.S. and multilateral foreign-aid spigots.

Meanwhile, these important developments have been virtually invisible to the American public:

* Since taking over as Afghanistan's prime minister, Hamid Karzai moved quickly to establish relations with Tehran and welcome high-level Iranian officials.

* Through the Tehran-based Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), Iran and the Stans have made alarming inroads vis a vis Turkey and Persian Gulf states.

* In the first week of February, the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation held its annual summit in Tehran.

* On February 1st, the 120 nations of the G-77 group (with headquarters at the UN) elected Iran to be the organization's president.

* Tehran has continued taking huge armaments shipments from Putin's Russia.

"Come into my parlor...."