President George W. Bush lit a match re-igniting Cold War tensions in November 2006 with his plan to put missiles into Eastern Europe as part of an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system — ostensibly to defend Europe and the United States against an alleged threat of attack from Iran. The plan is to deploy radar to track incoming missiles in the Czech Republic and 10 silo-based interceptor missiles in Poland.
Russia reacted to the announced plan with alarm. Russian President Vladimir Putin had already been sensitive to Russia’s loss of superpower status and the Bush administration’s military expansionism. He repeatedly warned about “those who would like to build a unipolar world, who would themselves like to rule all of humanity.” Last year he denounced NATO’s 1999 admission of nations from Russia’s former sphere of influence — Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. Two of those nations are the very ones Pres. Bush has now recruited for his ABM outpost. The head of the Russian armed forces’ general staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, observed, “An ABM area near Europe’s Russian borders is an unfriendly step, to put it mildly.”
The alleged Iranian threat is non-existent. Iran has no inter-continental ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, much less the United States — which is good, because the U.S. “midcourse” interception ABM system doesn’t work. After 25 years of development and more than $120 billion dissipated, President Reagan’s “Star Wars” fantasy of shooting down a bullet with a bullet amounts to nothing more than a welfare program for the industrial part of the military-industrial complex.
Nevertheless, basing missiles at Russia’s doorstep is a provocative and aggressive action, akin to Russia’s basing missiles in Cuba during the 1960s. Why would Russia not react defensively to our aggression now, as we reacted defensively to theirs then? Although the planned ABM system was characterized by Pres. Bush as benign relative to Russia, leading U.S. strategic analysts have explained that Russian planners must regard the system and its chosen location as a first-strike weapon.
The recent alleged Russian invasion of neighboring Georgia was used by the Bush administration as a pretext to conclude the agreement with Poland to place the ABM missiles there, thus, as Associated Press commentator Desmond Butler observed, “bolstering an argument made repeatedly by Moscow and rejected by Washington: that the true target of the system is Russia.”
The deal with Poland contains a highly unusual concession: a U.S. Patriot missile battery that can shoot down short-range missiles or attacking aircraft is to be moved from Germany to Poland, where it will be operated by a crew of about 100 American military personnel. American troops will join the Polish military, at least temporarily, at the front lines — facing east toward Russia.
NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe was described by former U.S. diplomat and Cold War expert, George Kennan, as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era, [which] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations.” Current efforts to expand NATO even further to Georgia and Ukraine could become extremely hazardous, especially in the aftermath of the August war in South Ossetia between Georgia and Russia. The five-day shooting war brought talk about a “new cold war” into the open.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a speech on Sept. 18, castigated Russia for its alleged invasion of Georgia. The following day, the Russian Foreign Ministry retorted in a statement that Rice had “grossly distorted the events caused by Georgian aggression against South Ossetia.” The statement said Russian military action had been undertaken solely to defend its citizens in the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali under attack by Georgia.
The key question — Which side was the first to launch military strikes? — is now receiving increased scrutiny that suggests Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili triggered the bloody war and then told the West bold-faced lies.
Information coming from NATO and OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, now paints a picture different from the one that prevailed during the first days of battle. It was already clear then to officers at NATO headquarters that the Georgians had started the conflict and that their actions were more calculated than either pure self-defense or a response to Russian provocation. Even more clearly, NATO officials believed that by no means could minor preliminary skirmishes that took place be seen as justification for Georgian war preparations.
The details extracted by Western intelligence agencies agree with NATO’s assessments. According to this information, Georgia amassed roughly 12,000 troops on its border with South Ossetia in July, along with a third of their military arsenal. Saakashvili’s plan, apparently, was to cut off South Ossetia from Russia. The detailed examination of the sequence of events is now seen as evidence that Russia did not act offensively, but merely reacted to a blitzkrieg attack by Georgia. There are now calls in Washington DC and Europe for an independent investigation of the matter.
Secretary of State Rice also charged in her speech that Russia is becoming “increasingly authoritarian” and “aggressive” — a highly ironic case of the pot calling the kettle black. She said Russia’s leaders are putting their country “on a one-way path to self-imposed isolation and international irrelevance.” Russian President Dmitri Medvedev countered the following day that no external circum-stances or outside pressure will change Russia’s strategic goal to modernize its military and raise its defense capability to a proper level, that is, to a level where the United States won’t throw its weight around in their backyard.
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo ben-Ami, writing in the Beirut Daily Star, advised: “The U.S. ... must understand that, when excluded and despised, Russia can be a major global spoiler. Ignored and humiliated by the U.S. since the Cold War ended, Russia needs integration into a new global order that respects its interests as a resurgent power, not an anti-Western strategy of confrontation.”
As a country with a huge military machine, we must rein in our imperialist forays and engage our adversaries in cooperation for mutual security, not in provocation that can escalate dangerously.
– edited from Voice of
America, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, Der Spiegel, www.chomsky.info, Washington Post and
RIA Novosti
Peacemeal, Sept/October 2008
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)