Post by Wayne Hall on Aug 15, 2008 3:22:18 GMT -5
Re: Bush opens a third potential war front in Georgia!
Here is some of the writing of F. William Engdahl on this subject.
Engdahl weakens his analysis in my view by incorporating
popular "conventional wisdom" on the subject of nuclear weapons
and "nuclear deterrence".
I have written to him, and to his publisher Michel Chossudovsky,
about this but so far have received no reply.
If the Russian government does not control "Russian nuclear weapons"
then the situation could well be even more serious. The weapons in
question could be employed as a provocation without the consent of
the Russian government, and this then used to justify
whatever "countermeasures" might be judged appropriate.
Any attempts by the Russian government to dissociate itself from such
actions would of course be dismissed as propaganda. Nuclear weapons
are a branch of the mass media, not a branch of the armed forces.
I think that discussion along these lines would be much more
productive than Engdahl's conventional nuclear fearmongering (and
conventional slandering of Boris Yeltsin, who might have been a
disaster and a drunken no-hoper in most respects, but who had good
policies on the subject of nuclear weapons. Putin, by contrast, may
well be more compromised than Yeltsin ever was, as part of the payoff
for being allowed to play the tough guy for his domestic audience).
WH
Russia's "New Order" of security relations incorporating the US,
Russia and the European Union
The Medvedev proposal
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, July 22, 2008
www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=9641
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the current US Presidential
campaign, aside from the studied avoidance of any serious proposals
to address the worst economic depression since the 1930's, is the
fact that both major party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain,
have to date been stone silent on the most pressing issue of future
war or peace, namely the steps taken by the Bush-Cheney
Administration to encircle Russia with a new Iron Curtain of NATO
member states, including strenuous efforts to push Ukraine and
Georgia into NATO, and to establish an advanced nuclear missile
defense system which, from a standpoint of military strategy, far
from defense, puts the world on a hair-trigger to nuclear holocaust
in the few years ahead.
In this context, it is equally disturbing how the Western major media
and the Washington Administration have chosen to ignore what might be
a last glimmer of hope for diplomatic resolution of a looming nuclear
war by miscalculation. The present policy of the Bush Administration
genuinely can be called Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, as in the
brilliant Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove.
Medvedev's proposals
In this context there are proposals being offered by Russia's new
President, Dmitry Medvedev, however tentative, which bear closer
scrutiny than the West has yet given. Since becoming President, he
has begun in speech after speech to speak of a proposed "new order"
of security relations incorporating the United States, Russia and the
European Union. At the very least it offers a starting point for
entering new dialogue rather than escalate the current NATO
provocation course that the Bush Administration has followed since
2001 against Moscow. The details are worth noting, even if still
preliminary.
The first outlines of Medvedev's concept for cooperation not
confrontation between East and West came in Berlin in June during his
talks with German Chancellor Merkel. There he proposed an all-
European security pact with Russia's participation, inherently in
opposition to NATO.
The West faced an entirely new possibility in 1989 as Mikhail
Gorbachev allowed the Berlin Wall to collapse and soon after Russia
dissolved the military Warsaw Pact alliance against NATO. At the time
there was great expectation within many European capitals that a new
era of peaceful cooperation would slowly evolve as mutual trust could
be established between the two major Cold War foes—the United States
and Russia. It was also clear to many that the need for NATO would
also vanish.
The failed opportunity
There was serious debate at that time whether in fact NATO was at all
necessary in a world where Moscow had agreed to systematically
dismantle its nuclear arsenal and open its economy up to the West,
even including allowing the International Monetary Fund to dictate
economic policy. While Moscow engaged in reducing its military forces
and its nuclear stockpiles, the United States chose to maintain and
even expand NATO, now to the very former satellite nations of the
Warsaw Pact.
It is important to be clear as to the timing of the
alleged "aggressive" turn of former President Vladimir Putin. The
provocations came not from the side of Moscow. Rather they came from
NATO and most especially the United States. Following the 2001 US
declaration of a global all-out War on Terror, the Bush
Administration has significantly escalated its efforts to achieve
what any sober Kremlin strategist would have to understand as a total
military encirclement of Russia by NATO member countries. We may ask
what that has to do with the War on Terror as defined by the Pentagon.
In 2003 the US Administration held private talks with Russian
oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky about arranging a sale of 40% of what
was then Russia's largest oil company, Yukos-Sibneft to US oil giant
Chevron, the former firm of Condi Rice. George H.W. Bush, then an
adviser to the once-powerful Washington investment group, Carlyle
Partners came to Moscow to lobby for the US oil firm's bid. That
would have allowed the US directly to place itself, in conjunction
with the British Petroleum presence in Russia, in a strategic place
within Russia's vital energy complex.
Following the arrest of Khodorkovsky by Russian police in 2004,
Russia was then faced with CIA and US State Department-sponsored and
financed putsches in Georgia and then in Ukraine which brought into
power politicians who had previously been cultivated by Washington
and who openly advocated NATO membership.
Seen from Moscow eyes, the attempt of NATO to take Ukraine or Kievan
Rus, the historic heart of Slavic Russia for almost one thousand
years, along with Russia and Belarus, was not only militarily a grave
threat. It was also culturally and economically potentially
catastrophic given the distribution of industry and infrastructure
between Ukraine and Russia dating back to the 1930's.
However, the proverbial "straw that broke the Russian camel's back"
was the decision by Washington to pursue nuclear missile defense
installations in NATO members Poland and the Czech Republic.
To add insult to injury, as Russian military spokesmen point out, not
only is a missile installation in Poland and US-controlled advanced
radar installations in the Czech area absurd from the alleged need to
defend against what the Bush Administration alleges are "Iranian
rogue missile threats." More threatening, there would be no way for
Moscow to verify that the ten US-controlled interceptor missiles in
Poland were not in fact US intermediate ballistic missiles capable of
carrying nuclear warheads. Military experts confirm there is no way
to verify. A US nuclear missile would be then only minutes away from
its Russian target rather than hours, leaving no window of
negotiation or defense.
Missile defense is anything but "defensive." If only one of two
nuclear opponents also possesses even a primitive anti-missile
capability, it would achieve the dream of Pentagon strategists since
the 1950's, namely Nuclear Primacy. Put in simple terms, it would
mean Washington would be in a position to dictate terms of
unconditional surrender of Russia to NATO. The way would open for a
complete US military domination of the planet as, with Russia
neutered, China would be able to offer little effective military
defense. There are simply no other contenders that can make a
credible counterweight to a sole US hegemony. That would be an
unhealthy state of affairs not only for Europe and the rest of the
world. It would be a disaster for the American people as well.
Here is some of the writing of F. William Engdahl on this subject.
Engdahl weakens his analysis in my view by incorporating
popular "conventional wisdom" on the subject of nuclear weapons
and "nuclear deterrence".
I have written to him, and to his publisher Michel Chossudovsky,
about this but so far have received no reply.
If the Russian government does not control "Russian nuclear weapons"
then the situation could well be even more serious. The weapons in
question could be employed as a provocation without the consent of
the Russian government, and this then used to justify
whatever "countermeasures" might be judged appropriate.
Any attempts by the Russian government to dissociate itself from such
actions would of course be dismissed as propaganda. Nuclear weapons
are a branch of the mass media, not a branch of the armed forces.
I think that discussion along these lines would be much more
productive than Engdahl's conventional nuclear fearmongering (and
conventional slandering of Boris Yeltsin, who might have been a
disaster and a drunken no-hoper in most respects, but who had good
policies on the subject of nuclear weapons. Putin, by contrast, may
well be more compromised than Yeltsin ever was, as part of the payoff
for being allowed to play the tough guy for his domestic audience).
WH
Russia's "New Order" of security relations incorporating the US,
Russia and the European Union
The Medvedev proposal
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, July 22, 2008
www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=9641
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the current US Presidential
campaign, aside from the studied avoidance of any serious proposals
to address the worst economic depression since the 1930's, is the
fact that both major party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain,
have to date been stone silent on the most pressing issue of future
war or peace, namely the steps taken by the Bush-Cheney
Administration to encircle Russia with a new Iron Curtain of NATO
member states, including strenuous efforts to push Ukraine and
Georgia into NATO, and to establish an advanced nuclear missile
defense system which, from a standpoint of military strategy, far
from defense, puts the world on a hair-trigger to nuclear holocaust
in the few years ahead.
In this context, it is equally disturbing how the Western major media
and the Washington Administration have chosen to ignore what might be
a last glimmer of hope for diplomatic resolution of a looming nuclear
war by miscalculation. The present policy of the Bush Administration
genuinely can be called Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, as in the
brilliant Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove.
Medvedev's proposals
In this context there are proposals being offered by Russia's new
President, Dmitry Medvedev, however tentative, which bear closer
scrutiny than the West has yet given. Since becoming President, he
has begun in speech after speech to speak of a proposed "new order"
of security relations incorporating the United States, Russia and the
European Union. At the very least it offers a starting point for
entering new dialogue rather than escalate the current NATO
provocation course that the Bush Administration has followed since
2001 against Moscow. The details are worth noting, even if still
preliminary.
The first outlines of Medvedev's concept for cooperation not
confrontation between East and West came in Berlin in June during his
talks with German Chancellor Merkel. There he proposed an all-
European security pact with Russia's participation, inherently in
opposition to NATO.
The West faced an entirely new possibility in 1989 as Mikhail
Gorbachev allowed the Berlin Wall to collapse and soon after Russia
dissolved the military Warsaw Pact alliance against NATO. At the time
there was great expectation within many European capitals that a new
era of peaceful cooperation would slowly evolve as mutual trust could
be established between the two major Cold War foes—the United States
and Russia. It was also clear to many that the need for NATO would
also vanish.
The failed opportunity
There was serious debate at that time whether in fact NATO was at all
necessary in a world where Moscow had agreed to systematically
dismantle its nuclear arsenal and open its economy up to the West,
even including allowing the International Monetary Fund to dictate
economic policy. While Moscow engaged in reducing its military forces
and its nuclear stockpiles, the United States chose to maintain and
even expand NATO, now to the very former satellite nations of the
Warsaw Pact.
It is important to be clear as to the timing of the
alleged "aggressive" turn of former President Vladimir Putin. The
provocations came not from the side of Moscow. Rather they came from
NATO and most especially the United States. Following the 2001 US
declaration of a global all-out War on Terror, the Bush
Administration has significantly escalated its efforts to achieve
what any sober Kremlin strategist would have to understand as a total
military encirclement of Russia by NATO member countries. We may ask
what that has to do with the War on Terror as defined by the Pentagon.
In 2003 the US Administration held private talks with Russian
oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky about arranging a sale of 40% of what
was then Russia's largest oil company, Yukos-Sibneft to US oil giant
Chevron, the former firm of Condi Rice. George H.W. Bush, then an
adviser to the once-powerful Washington investment group, Carlyle
Partners came to Moscow to lobby for the US oil firm's bid. That
would have allowed the US directly to place itself, in conjunction
with the British Petroleum presence in Russia, in a strategic place
within Russia's vital energy complex.
Following the arrest of Khodorkovsky by Russian police in 2004,
Russia was then faced with CIA and US State Department-sponsored and
financed putsches in Georgia and then in Ukraine which brought into
power politicians who had previously been cultivated by Washington
and who openly advocated NATO membership.
Seen from Moscow eyes, the attempt of NATO to take Ukraine or Kievan
Rus, the historic heart of Slavic Russia for almost one thousand
years, along with Russia and Belarus, was not only militarily a grave
threat. It was also culturally and economically potentially
catastrophic given the distribution of industry and infrastructure
between Ukraine and Russia dating back to the 1930's.
However, the proverbial "straw that broke the Russian camel's back"
was the decision by Washington to pursue nuclear missile defense
installations in NATO members Poland and the Czech Republic.
To add insult to injury, as Russian military spokesmen point out, not
only is a missile installation in Poland and US-controlled advanced
radar installations in the Czech area absurd from the alleged need to
defend against what the Bush Administration alleges are "Iranian
rogue missile threats." More threatening, there would be no way for
Moscow to verify that the ten US-controlled interceptor missiles in
Poland were not in fact US intermediate ballistic missiles capable of
carrying nuclear warheads. Military experts confirm there is no way
to verify. A US nuclear missile would be then only minutes away from
its Russian target rather than hours, leaving no window of
negotiation or defense.
Missile defense is anything but "defensive." If only one of two
nuclear opponents also possesses even a primitive anti-missile
capability, it would achieve the dream of Pentagon strategists since
the 1950's, namely Nuclear Primacy. Put in simple terms, it would
mean Washington would be in a position to dictate terms of
unconditional surrender of Russia to NATO. The way would open for a
complete US military domination of the planet as, with Russia
neutered, China would be able to offer little effective military
defense. There are simply no other contenders that can make a
credible counterweight to a sole US hegemony. That would be an
unhealthy state of affairs not only for Europe and the rest of the
world. It would be a disaster for the American people as well.