And The Hits Keep Coming
From CNN: Post-Soviet nations to form military force
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) — A Russian-led bloc of post-Soviet nations has agreed to establish a rapid-reaction military force to combat terrorists and respond to regional emergencies, Russian media reported Wednesday.
The decision came a day after reports that Kyrgyzstan is planning to close a strategically important U.S. military base that Washington uses to transport troops and supplies into Afghanistan.
On Wednesday, the Collective Security Treaty Organization — made up of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — decided on the rapid-reaction force at a Kremlin summit, the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti reported.
And what a lovely group of nations it is, led by former Communist Party bosses and KGB operatives. So much for any liberalization in Central Asia. Just another benefit of the “Global War on Terror”, which is the excuse for this.
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“Back in the US… back in the US… back in the USSR…”
And to think that the self-proclaimed “party of Reagan” brought this about. Even Ronnie is probably turning in his grave.
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This is a collection of some of the worst people the Soviet system managed to cough up in 70 years. Most of these “leaders” are Stalinist dictators who are “elected” by 80% margins – or else…
[There’s a book somewhere that says that 80% is the recommended number to “prove” the election wasn’t rigged. More than than is greedy. In most of these countries the “loyal opposition” is loyal, and on the payroll.]
The words “Soviet” and “rapid-reaction military force” in the same sentence gives me chills.
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Dear Raygun was almost responsible for WW3. But it would have been a short war. The cockroaches would have survived. 🙂 Raygun is the one who started the whole rightwingnut evangelical *Evil Empire* rhetoric directed at the former USSR. A rather moronic thing to do given that the USSR leadership were already in a high state of paranoia thanks to Hitler’s con-job invasion. Then there was ‘Able Archer 83’ and a USSR nuclear launch spy sat early warning system that was faulty. Most nations would have taken as a tip that the USSR was paranoid when the USSR shot down a passenger airliner (Korean Airlines) that strayed into Soviet airspace, but to the USA it was justifications for making things worse. 🙂 Most Americans have no idea how close they came to being annihilated thanks to Raygun and the Wingnuts (Hey, that could be the name of a band). LOL Luckily for the USA, the watch commander of the Soviet EWS was cool headed and didn’t press the panic button, three times. 🙂
Stupid is as stupid does, as often as possible. 😀
At least that bastion of freedom, Turkmenistan, is standing up to them.
Rumor has it that the Korean airliner was shot down because the scene commander couldn’t admit to Moscow that the radars that were supposed to be tracking in that area weren’t working, even though they had been reported operational, and the area that was affected passed off the KAL flight as a standard US recon mission that they could track in their sleep. They launched assuming they were going to find a US military aircraft that had violated Soviet airspace, which would have been a propaganda coup, and ordered it shot down even though it was ID’s as a civilian 747, and not an USAF RC-135.
The affected radar wasn’t working half the time when I flew in the area. There were very good reasons why it didn’t work, a big one being the siting which tended to move quite often as it was on a very active fault. Kamchatka is not a very stable place.
The command was paranoid, and didn’t want to hear that there was a huge hole in their radar coverage in a sensitive area. That was a total cock-up, but you didn’t read it here.
Well, John, Berdimuhammedow was elected with an 89% vote so his government couldn’t be accepted. There are rules and 80% of the vote is the maximum you are allowed to receive or there would be a competition to see who got the highest.
Actually the absence of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan from the coalition might have more to do with the fact that they have their own oil and gas resources and don’t need Russia for their heat and electricity. The Turkmeni in particular are annoyed that Russians has been selling their natural gas to former republics for rubles, rather than the West for Euros, and skimming the profits.
I expect some type of deal with Iran, and probably Turkey to handle exports in the future.
If Turkmenbashi was still alive, he wouldn’t have joined unless he could have been the Generalissimo of all the forces with a really nicely decorated hat involved.
Ah yes, the hat. The mental image just isn’t right without that hat. Kinda like Former Dear Leader and his flight suit with the giant cod-piece :-)>
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LOL Just about all the Soviet equipment was faulty, as you well know Bryan. 😀 Which, given the paranoia, was a good reason not to provoke them. Prodding a bear with a bad tooth is a really good way to get torn to shreds. Luckily, some sanity prevailed in the end (at least, as far as the USSR is concerned. Then again, maybe the commanders were worried most of the missiles would just detonate in the silo’s.) LOL
Yeah… the hat. LOL
No one would know you were important if you didn’t have a hat.
Of course the Shrubbery always had his special podium with him, or no one would know who he was. He reminded me of kids at camp who had name tags sew on all their clothes.
You have to wonder how George Washington managed to be President without a cart full of props, or how Sherman could be a general in a uniform that looked like it was a dog’s bed when he didn’t have it on.
Ah yes… The bullet-proof podium! LOL But not shoe-proof it seems. 😉
Bush has his straw hat he wears on the Ranch (when he knows the photographers will be there). Does that count? LOL The rolled sox didn’t work out so well for him. A bit too blatant, which considering Bushmoron has the subtlety of someone who’d use a nuke to swat a fly, what else would it be? I suspect he’s the only person in the Whole World who thinks he’s not Mr. Obvious. LOL
Actually, it would have been rather painful if he had had to eject with the parachute harness rigged that badly. Chute opening would have come as a real surprise.
It is a safety violation to walk around on the flight deck like that the last I knew.
The straw hat not to be a cowboy. The feed cap not to be a farmer. He modeled a lot of costumes.
If only the American voting public had decided it was a last-straw hat…
The more I read, the more I’m glad I was never involved in the same business you guys pursued in your youth. I knew already about the close calls that have been made public in the intervening years, and I think I don’t want to know about all the others…
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Yeah, Steve, makes me glad that the Air Farce turned me down (said the recruiter, “what part of ‘flightless waterfowl’ do you not understand?” — well, not in those words, but the meaning was clear that flying was not going to be my thing, something about flat-footed waddling waterfowl not being the model for airmen :-). As for Dear Leader’s chute opening, Bryan, are you saying that he would have been singing in a really high voice for the rest of his life? Heh.
And Turkmenbashi… yes, it would have to be a very fancy hat, with feathers and gold fringes and such. But don’t forget the rest of the uniform. The Father of All Turkmen could never accept a position as Supreme Leader Generalissimo of all the forces with just an ordinary military uniform. It would have to be a special one, with epaulets. And medals. Lots of shiny medals. And stripes on the sleeves and lots of chest cabbage. And decorated buttons. Just plain old buttons wouldn’t be good enough. And a bright sash. I have an image in mind, I think it may have been an Indian military uniform, but I can’t seem to dig it up, oh well! Too bad Turkmenbashi had the bad luck to die and leave his look-alike in charge… I have not enough knowledge of Berdymukhamedov (or however you spell his name 🙂 to know whether he has any of Turkmenbashi’s, err, quirks. Well, other than the absolute dictator thing. 89% is just embarrassing.
It wasn’t all bad, Steve, and you knew the risks and did train for them.
BT, he would have made a canary sound like a basso profundo, but dogs would like him.
Braid and cords and fringe, and a horse, of course, with a jeweled sword, and …
Maybe they just missed the meeting because they couldn’t figure out what day it was on the new calendar that Turkmenbashi created. The Marx brothers would have been perfect for a bio-flick, or maybe they were the source for his ideas.
A remake of Duck Soup set in the Stans? I suppose Sasha Baron Cohen would make a passable ambassador from Syvania, but could who could replace Groucho, or Maggie Dumont?
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I know what you mean Steve. I often wished I didn’t know half of what I know, or saw what I saw. But on my good days, I am glad we were there to prevent some very stupid decisions that would have had deadly consequences. I suppose that it’s easy for me and others like myself to be a little blaze about the whole intel *thing* and about some of the stupid things we know that all politicians at all levels did and do. 🙂 The real honest to G-d truth is, *they* are no different to *us*. 😉 The only superficial difference is ideology. *they* have people like me who tried to learn enough about what was happening and what was the driving force of certain events. If we discovered that someone had started a potential disaster, we did what we had to to stop it. Bryan and I worked in different areas of the biz, but I think we had the same basic attitude, as did many on all sides. We just wanted to do whatever we could to keep us all safe from the ignorant fools and assorted crazies, whether they belonged to *them* or *us*. 😉 I knew several like-minded American, British, Russians and Chinese etc, and once we understood that although we worked for different bosses, and had a different ideology, we were sane and wanted to stop the crazies from destroying the World, whether they were our crazies or theirs, didn’t matter except insofar as the approach we had to take to stop them.
There were several rumors about why KAL007 was actually shot down Bryan. One of my contacts told me the rumor you posted above, and another that it was known it was a civilian airliner, and that it was carrying an important (so it was thought) US politician, Congressman Lawrence McDonald, and the Soviet decided to send Reagan a message for all his *Evil Empire* rhetoric and other things. One thing that came from it is that Reagan decided to allow civilian aircraft to use the more precise military GPS system and it forced a redesign by aircraft manufacturers of the autopilot system.
The greatest danger that the Bush Administration posed was to decimate and politicize the US intel services. They got rid of anyone they found who wasn’t a complete ass-kissing wingnut ideologue. So, the watchdogs became that same as the crazies. That’s why Bushmoron was able to create so many disasters, some of which most US citizens are still unaware of. I have to admit that were I still in the biz the past decade, I would have done all I could with all the insider contacts I had from every Nation to stop the US in any way possible. It would have been my opinion that the USA had become potentially the most dangerous Nation on Earth. The Bushmorons didn’t understand the way the *game* works and decided to ignore all the rules. The USA became a rogue State. Hopefully, Obama understands and repairs that damage, before it’s too late. 🙂
So, yes. During the Reagan years, WW3 was a possibility. But Soviet *friends* made sure that cool heads were in important places, such as the faulty Soviet early warning systems. It was a few weeks after the Soviets shot down KAL007. My Russian and other contacts were very nervous about the heightened paranoia in the Politburo, Soviet Military and KGB etc., and the stupid red flag waving coming from the White House. So, plans were put in place to save us all from out masters, and those who would take advantage of this situation for their own agenda’s. 🙂 The politicians didn’t know that there had been 3 US missile launch warnings during a high state of alert until well after the event, and then they were given a plausible story for the events. By a strange coincidence, my superiors here didn’t get the memo that the Soviets had detected bogus US missile launches, which they would have been duty bound to pass on to the US, who would have immediately raised their nuclear alert status, which would have added weight to the bogus launch warnings, which would have raised the status in the USSR, which would have… 😉 You get the idea. 🙂 We decided that the politicians were too busy with important matters like dinner reservations etc to be bothered with such mundane things which we understood completely and could deal with just fine. And see, it worked. We are all still here and the general population doesn’t know what *truly* happened that fateful week when the World could have ended, and would have if the Politicians had been allowed to make decisions. 🙂 It isn’t always a good idea to allow Politicians to know things. Politicians are most dangerous when they know too little, or too much 😉
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.
Albert Einstein
I think we would have to do a British cast, John, because the US just doesn’t have the talent pool that was once available.
The tape that Reagan played contains a clear description of a 747 with the double row of cabin windows at the front, so there was no mistaking what it was. Of course, the Soviets don’t have the International emergency frequencies in their radios to avoid defections, which prevented any contact with the aircraft.
The aircraft was doomed, because it would have been shot down by Sakhalin air defense systems if the aircraft hadn’t splashed it. They are a different military district and have no sense of humor.
Immediately following the shot-down the Soviet media reported it as an American military aircraft from Shemya, which is why I tuned in to the problem. Later reports claimed they had a CIA photo pod on the aircraft, which is why it overflew Petropavlovsk, like we would trust Korea with equipment that sophisticated for anything other than a Korea centered operation.
Oh, yes, you don’t tell the bosses everything or they might think they were really in charge. When it’s your butt that is going to get shot at if things go bad there are things that are kept in notebooks, not in reports. That’s one of the things that bothered me most about what the Hedgemony was doing – a lot of long time unofficial agreements were probably flushed by their screwing around with the raw data. They didn’t know the good guys from the bad.
It paid to remember that a lot of the senior people started out in the Moscow military district during Stalin, so paranoia was a necessary survival trait. Most of them had zero combat experience which means no true appreciation of what war really means.
As you say, Kryten, there are no new radioactive glassy areas added to the landscape, so we must have been pretty good at what we did. I think that people who vote for wars should be given the “honor” of being in the lead company for the first assault. War is very different after you figure out that the other side can shoot back.
Oh yes! Amen to that! I’ve often thought that the leaders of any warmongering should lead by example, from the front. A long way in front. Then, once the reasons for the war are gone, the rest of us can go home. 🙂
The 70’s – 90’s were a very dangerous and unstable time. It was exhausting trying to keep track of all the players and figure out what they were planning and why. Most of the time, we just did the job we were paid to do. Every now and then, we’d see or hear something that would make that little “Danger Will Robinson!” thought come up and I’d usually utter the fateful words “Oh, sh*t!” if it was something I’d not known soon enough or missed and was probably too late to stop, or “Jesus C*!! Here we go again!” If i saw something (like when Regan announced that the USSR was the ‘Evil Empire’ in some address). I usually shared an office with 2 or 3 others and if they were there, they would usually sigh and say “Now what?” And I’d be on my secure phone to whoever my appropriate opposite number was and say “Well?” And they would get busy with their contacts. I made sure I worked with good sane people. Ideologues and ladder climbers didn’t last long in my office. 😉 🙂 Sometimes, my phone would ring and one of my Russian contacts would invite me for dinner. If he said ‘chilled vodka’, that meant there was a problem, ‘Icy vodka’ meant a serious problem. “beer’ meant the World was about to end. LOL There were a lot of rules we had to abide by, and we did.
After KAL007 was splashed, I had a call from a Russian contact who was very nervous and annoyed. Very unusual for him. He was very worried. The Politburo and KGB considered Reagan very dangerous and a threat to the USSR.
You know… a lot of people credit the dissolution of the USSR on Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programs, but the truth is that the USSR did it to themselves. It would have happened anyway. All Reagan did, was to almost bankrupt the USA and make the MIC players very wealthy. 🙂 It’s a shame that so many people are so ignorant about what really happens around the World. 🙂 Much of it would never happen if people had a clue and gave a rat’s ass. 🙂
BTW when you posted about Rivet Ball a while back, it stirred some half-forgotten memories about that name and others, and Shemya, and several things. I found a good site that triggered lot’s of memories and gave me quite a few smiles. 🙂 They seemed like a good bunch of cool headed guys, my kind of people. 😉 You probably already know it, but anyway… by Kingdon R. “King” Hawes Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.):
A Tale of Two Airplanes
I enjoyed his stories, and ‘The Iron Pumpkin’ video. 😀 Did you get your balls? 😉 LOL
Well… that was curious. We had a power surge just as I was finishing that comment. It seems to have published itself. 🙂
It has reached 46.4C (in the shade). The hottest day in Vic ever recorded. A hot Northerly wind has been gusting to 90Km/h which has been pushing fires to fast to deal with effectively. Meanwhile, up North, especially Queensland, they have had 900mm of rain in Feb so far! That’s insane. 🙂 We haven’t had any rain down Sth in Months, and they get our entire annual quota in a matter of days. Crazy stuff.
Anyway, I was just going to add a last paragraph to the above that I saw your name listed at the site, and reading about that crash. Yeah, I understand close calls. You never forget, sometimes even when you sleep.
Hawes was a Captain and an Electronics Warfare Officer when I knew him, part of the frat boy circus that put the shark mouth on the nose of the aircraft when the Commander of the 15th Air Force came in for an inspection.
The Secret Squirrels and the Circus didn’t interact a lot, but I used to tick him off with a piece of equipment that the ground could activate when they didn’t follow the established protocol on the times. There was no way for me to stop them doing it on the ground, other than to send nasty memos, but that sucker would mess up everyone’s work when it tripped.
SAC allowed those guys to takes pictures and violate all kinds of rules that we got dinged for by our command.
They did good work, but we had our own people who did the same job, only in my command they were enlisted, not officers.
The Soviet Union fell when they ran out of money. They couldn’t afford a space program, ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, a large conventional army to keep China at bay, and a reasonable standard of living for their own people.
The need to import food because of the mess Khrushchev made of the farming sector required hard currency, and they didn’t have it. They exited not with a bang, but a whimper when the cash ran out.
Hmm, Khruschchev and farming… a brief search found this declassified CIA document. Interesting. What is it with politicians who think they know how to handle stuff that’s clearly outside of their area of expertise? Kinda reminds me of politicians who think the answer to all economic problems is tax cuts. Same level of stupidity…
Well, Khrushchev did such a wonderful job when he was in charge of the Ukraine during the 1930s. What’s a few million people starving to death because you have exported all of the food grown in a region?