Another Nice Mess
From Associated Press: Putin Offers Blunt Victory Day Speech
Who was President Vladimir Putin talking about when he said the world faces threats to peace like those that led to World War II?
Putin’s statement at a Victory Day parade on Red Square on Wednesday was artfully phrased to be both blunt and vague, but political observers have little doubt he was criticizing the United States for “disrespect for human life, claims to global exclusiveness and dictate, just as it was in the time of the Third Reich.”
[snip]
Shortly after his speech at the parade, Putin told veterans at a Kremlin reception that World War II showed “where militarist ambitions, ethnic intolerance and any attempts to recarve the globe are leading to.”
[Sergei] Markov [Institute for Political Research] saw that as another veiled reference to the United States.
“After the Cold War ended, the United States has initiated a new arms race,” fueling nuclear ambitions of many nations worldwide, he said.
“If a nation doesn’t have nuclear weapons, it risks being bombed like Yugoslavia or Iraq,” he said. “And if it does have nuclear weapons like North Korea, it faces no such threat.”
Because we don’t have enough problems, let’s re-start the Cold War. People don’t like it when you start throwing your weight around around, especially when they know you don’t have the resources to back up your words.
The real problem is that we have left ourselves in the position that Russia can be a bigger pain than the Soviet Union was. A lot of people who ignored the Soviets, listen to Russia. Russia is vital to European energy needs for some time into the future, giving them leverage.
5 comments
No. Uh-uh. No Second Cold War, thank you; the first one came quite close enough to becoming glowing hot. And for Mr. Bush, mutually assured destruction is no deterrent; MAD means nothing to the truly mad. (Apologies, Ms. Kane!)
Jonathan Schell once wrote of mutually assured destruction (sorry, I can’t find the quote online, and I don’t own the book, so I’m paraphrasing) that when a man is standing on a window ledge 20 stories above the ground, threatening to jump, we don’t express relief that he hasn’t jumped yet, and we don’t praise ledges as safe places to stand. IMHO, that’s about right.
I was born in a MAD world; I had hoped to live out my life with a less MAD policy from our own leaders or those of the former Soviet states. The current group of nut-cases… theirs and ours… aren’t making matters easier.
OT, I saw via ellroon that there is now a third U.S. carrier group in the Persian Gulf. Again, my fears would be better assuaged if we had another Executive branch.
Just to make you day, I saw somewhere that there rumors that al Qaeda is going to attempt some sort of “false flag” operation to set off a war between the US and Iran, which sounds about right. There’s nothing al Qaeda would like better than having its two biggest enemies at each others throats.
No such thing as a ‘false flag’ where this administration is concerned. Any little flag will do.
And now Cheney shows up on one of those carriers, another instance of this insane administration’s pointing its Dick at Iran. What is it with these guys and aircraft carriers? If I understood correctly, one of the carriers was to have been rotated out of that theater for maintenance and crew R&R; I wonder if that will still happen, or if President Cheney will order it to stay to make the threat greater.
It is hardly comforting that we are not the first great nation to be essentially seized by leaders bent on world domination. But with the alleged leadership’s thinking of the Fifties, threatening to use the weaponry of the Sixties, and confronting the state and nonstate actors of the Nineties and Naughties, the stakes for civilization may be a bit higher this time around.
They couldn’t figure out that the Taliban and Saddam were Iran’s biggest worries, and they don’t understand that Iran and al Qaeda are enemies. They didn’t understand that Russia doesn’t want the US involved in the former Soviet Bloc, and they don’t understand the motives of China.
I want someone to explain to me how these people are supposed to be foreign policy/security party, when they don’t have a clue about much of anything that goes on in the world.