NOV 16 - 30, 2004

VOL. 2 ISSUE 22

NOVEMBER 17, 2004 – Remember the battle in which we secured our Cold War victory?

Right, there never was one.  We only were considered the victors because we were the ones left standing at the end with the strong economy, the world behind us, and our military strength dominant and in tact.

Flash forward to the George W. Bush/Putin era.

America is running record deficits beyond anything the nation has experienced, while Russia has developed its massive oil reserves to become the next to largest oil exporter on the planet, second only to Saudi Arabia.

America has decided to abandon its strong alliances with Europe, opting rather for acting alone with the idea that allies are not truly needed.  Russia has forged friendships with our former European allies, as well as with Middle Eastern nations like Iran.

One of the things that drove the for Soviet Union over the edge of bankruptcy was a disastrous decade-long venture into Afghanistan – you remember, the one in which we paid and trained Osama bin Laden to fight for us to defeat the USSR?  Now, Putin sits by and watches the American president he endorsed for re-election dawdle around in the desert, spending one billion dollars a week.

The greatest victory on the part of the US was the adoption of western, democratic ways by the Soviet Union.  Its use of the media as a one-party promoting propaganda machine disappeared and a free press began to grow.  Economic control by the state was replaced with capitalistic reforms.

Now, Putin has rolled back human rights and taken back over the media (see our article from last December: The Biggest Issue No One Is Talking About - President Bush's Naive Foreign Policy Allows Putin To Play Him And Set The Stage For The Second Coming Of The USSR ) while, at the same time, America’s President has helped to establish and embraced a one-party promoting propaganda media.

Putin’s party now has such dominance of the government, that he can make any law he wishes at will and rewrite the constitution as he sees fit. And the capitalistic reforms in Russia are being tossed aside in a power play by Putin and his former KGB buddies, as they use legalistic maneuvers to take over for themselves the largest oil company in Russia, Yukos.  (see our article from this past July: Pay Attention To Russia, Dammit!)

Meanwhile, rather than taking a strong stand against what is happening in the former USSR, demanding that the media not become once again a one-party run propaganda machine, standing up against one party rule, the US has followed the same course itself. Rather than standing for international human rights conventions as our nation did during the Cold War, we now thwart international treaties and torture prisoners, holding large numbers entirely without regard for such things as the Geneva Convention.

War is not a slugfest, it is a chess match.  And while the American people have embraced the reckless cowboy foreign policy of President Bush, deciding it is better than the more “subtle,” “sensitive” foreign policy offered by the other side, Putin has sat there laughing.  He has laid out a very intelligent course for his nation’s rise back to greatness.  And each step of the way, the Bush administration’s weak and cowardly foreign policy has played right into his hands.

The Bush administration is made up of chicken hawk bullies, not warriors, and so they happily and excitedly went after a defenseless sandbox like Iraq, but have yet to find the courage to take an actual stand against Russia or deal with North Korea or Iran, never mind messes in places like Pakistan, usefully.

And so Putin now is so confident that he stood before the world and announced today not just that Russia is building some new nuclear weapons to make sure it remains secure, but that his nation is about to complete a new generation of nuclear weapons unlike the world has ever seen.

As reported by CNN, “``I am sure that ... they will be put in service within the next few years and, what is more, they will be developments of the kind that other nuclear powers do not and will not have,'' Putin was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency. “

As in Russia to the US:  our nuclear arsenal will be superior to yours.

In particular, Russia has devised a new missile that not only can carry nuclear payloads almost 4 times as powerful as their previously most powerful weapons, but which are designed to make President Bush’s massively expensive pet project, the missile shield, completely useless.

From CNN, “Earlier this year, a senior Defense Ministry official was quoted as telling news agencies that Russia had developed a weapon that could make the United States' proposed missile-defense system useless. Details were not given, but military analysts said the claimed new weapon could be a hypersonic cruise missile or maneuverable ballistic missile warheads.”

President Bush’s response?  “”

Just to repeat his response:  “”

Response from John Kerry or any of the Democrats?  “”

Combined response of both major parties in our nation – the nation which fought a more than four decade-long Cold War to secure our safety and the advancement of democracy?  “”

The last election was about Iraq for both parties.  It should have been about Russia.

But indeed Iraq is about Russia.  Our venture into Iraq, and the world-deriding way in which President Bush went about it, has made Putin’s actions possible.  And now we are in a position where we no longer hold sway over the nation we supposedly vanquished.

And if we do not get both our economic house immediately in order and our alliances repaired, if we do not regain our financial footing and our respect and admiration in the world, the Cold War will be on again, except this time Russia will have the upper hand.

Sometimes, a “surrender” is just an excuse to bide time so a nation can regroup.  Which certainly George W. Bush and the South are familiar with.

America the liberal democracy won the Civil War a century and a half ago and the Cold War just a little over a decade ago.  But now the Russian flag is flying boastful and high, and the White House is flying under a one-party rule, one-party propaganda press-embracing, human rights and international law-discarding Confederate flag, without even tolerance for dissent from within their own party, as Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter learned this past week.

The Democratic Party says it needs an agenda.  How about standing up in defense of our Cold War victory and for the actual security of our nation?  How about making Russia the front-and-center issue it should be, and charting a course to do something about it?

Anyone?  Someone?

As I asked in the beginning of this article, anyone remember the battle in which we secured our Cold War victory?  Right, there never was one.  We only were considered the victors because we were the ones left standing at the end with the strong economy, the world behind us, and our military strength dominant and in tact.

Who is standing tallest now?  And who is on a course to reach higher, and who is on a downward course?

This game is not over.  Recently in America, we have seen what happens when one side is plotting a determined, aggressive course and the other side isn’t even acknowledging that side’s ascent; when one side is making bold, horrible moves and the other side never takes a strong stand against them.

As the Democrats and their Union values have silently, calmly, without true resistance sunk into defeat to their Confederate-brand Southern foes, will the US continue to choose to do the same with regard to the former Soviet Union?

Or does America even still embrace the liberal democratic values we stood for, or have, rather than the Soviet Union becoming more like us, we become more like those we used to stand against?

America better answer these questions for itself very quickly, because here’s a clue to the nation:  the Cold War and Russian power are far from over.