The New Cold War [Archive] - SUBSIM Radio Room Forums

SUBMAN1

12-16-07, 09:43 PM

Nice to see things are shaping up around the world. Guess it won't be long till WWIII breaks out.

-S

PS. Anyone find the irony in the following statement? :D

"One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way...the almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations...It is a world of one master, one sovereign ... it has nothing to do with democracy...This is nourishing the wish of countries to get nuclear weapons...This is very dangerous, nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law..."
- Vladmir Putin, Security Forum, Munich Germany, 02/11/2007 10

The article:

For a number of years, the hints have been apparent to those looking. In some ways, it has been apparent only as a sort of feeling of deja vu, a little like reading a few pages into a book and then realizing, "Hey, I've read this book!". That realization -- that inkling suddenly becomes a ull blown spine tingler...when you mentally put a finger on a passage and say before you've read it, "this is going to happen, you watch." And then you know. It's all happened before. In this case, we're saying there is a New Cold War in operation today, and it has been in operation for some time.

In politics and history, the same feeling can be had when history begins to repeat itself -- or at least patterns emerge that you've seen before. Especially when the people involved give you clues or the nations involved resembles a familiar pattern -- one you remember occuring not so long ago. Then, when governments return to age old practices that you had hoped were gone for good, you know it is more than just a vague feeling, it is a full blown epiphany. Thus we arrive at the situation today, the New Cold War brewing away, and in places, it is not so cold, it is damned well on fire.

We should note up front that this discussion will focus on the Middle East viewpoint, with mention of Europe and the Americas only made tangentially to that focus. However, there is additional evidence of the New Cold War worldwide, and we invite you to explore that for yourself. Don't be thrown off, for instance, by our lack of focus on the major Old Cold War tensions in Europe, where billions of dollars and millions of man-hours were spent in watching for a Soviet incursion into Western Europe. That is a story for another day.

The Old Cold War

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2215/theoldmz1.jpg

The Old Cold War emanated from a political realization that the two largest allies during World War II were fierce competitors and suddenly very unlikely to work together without considerable friction. Especially as one had the world's most powerful military technology, the atomic bomb, and the other had huge populations and a lust for more land, wealth and power.

The power vacuum after the conclusion in both theaters of war in the late 1940s left two major forces to preside over European and Asian reconstruction. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. This led to a "cold" confrontation -- the stance at the abyss, never quite materializing into an actual war, but at times getting pretty damned close.

In the U.S., a War Department was being molded into the Defense Department. The Army Air Corps was on its way to becoming the Air Force, complete with a world spanning command that could take the world's most horrid weapons to any spot on the globe. First through Intercontinental Bombers and then later, through Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that shortened the warning time in nuclear conflict from many hours to just a few minutes from launch to "finish".

The U.S.S.R., fighting this pace of technology, inspired great concerns, in what some called a paranoid delusion, but which was never-the-less based in fact. The Russian Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite opened U.S. military planners to the realization that the high ground was a very scary proposition and worthy of exploration for military purposes. After all, if Sputnik could rain down weapons fire instead of a weak radio signal, then it would be a difficult platform to detect and counter. Add nuclear weapons to this mix, and you suddenly have world ending battle fears.

The Cold War then emanated from two perilously powerful adversaries on opposite hemispheres of the world. That was actually a good thing...imagine the squabbles between neighbors that could have occurred if the USSR were perched in Canada?

The obvious geographical separation was a just as obvious opportunity for nearly uncontrolled expansion. Political differences and large geographical distances would have seemed to make the consolidation of power between the two giant forces proceed at an even pace. However, there was one huge problem. The empire dominated by the Russians WAS perched right next to the eastern borders of Europe. Post-war Europe was not so enamored of the Soviets then as they are of Russia today.

Stalin was seen quickly as an evil manipulator and the rapidly growing Soviet influence, enforced by tanks and troops nearly exploding out of Russia and gobbling up "allies" created much concern. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization marked the line finally, dividing Eastern and Western Europe, and creating the term the "West" to describe western Europe and delineate it from the "Eastern Bloc" of Soviet Nations.

What is important to understand from this exercise in history is what happened next. The Soviets, concerned about defections from their "alliance" in their West (The Eastern Bloc lay between Europe and the Western Russian border), began to clamp down on just about everything, creating what would be a philosophical and political entity that had no existence in the real world other than lines on a map.

The Iron Curtain was built on the necessity to keep "allies" in, and everyone else out. Secret societies do this with gatekeepers and watchdogs, and the Iron Curtain in Europe was not much different with lines to cross marked by Soviet troops guarding the "border". Then, in order to keep control of fleeing East Berliners, the Soviets put up the Berlin Wall, adding a concrete and wire barrier to illustrate to everyone what the Iron Curtain really meant. Keep those dissatisfied with the Soviet system in. Only spys wanted to cross in the other direction.

What happened next is appropriate to modern discussion of things Russian and is as telling as any other. After a period of consolidation that effectively also placed the "stakes in the ground" between the "East" and the "West", the Eastern border of Europe and the Western border of the Soviet Union became a trigger point. If either "side" were to cross the line, a newly nuclear Soviet Union would find itself embroiled in a nuclear confrontation with Western Europe and its ally, the United States of America, one of a couple of NATO partners far, far away from the geographies that created the tension.

With Russian's Western border locked down (so to speak, ask an older Polish resident about the days before the Soviet annexation of that nation into the fold), the only direction to expand was first East, and then South. Unfortunately, the Chinese were uneasy partners in the Communist revolution and at best, a friendly adversary and worse, a truculent ally.

And there remained the problem of what to do with the rest of the world. After all, when you are a worldly power, you must consider how to best expand and consolidate in cycles until you reach the limits of your existence. Especially if your ideology realizes that you cannot co-exist with those who believe nearly the opposite. Totalitarian control and economic controls versus Freedom of Expression and market economies. Almost like night and day, right?

The Big Lie

The problem of course is that neither side was 100% emmersed in their own political and economic charters. The harsh conditions in Europe after the last days of World War II lent compassionate Americans and the British to help their neighbors recover from destruction and deplorable economic collapse.

The Big Lie was that despite the Anti-Soviet zeal of the day, Europe was already leaning toward liberal socialism -- liberalism had the benefit of compassion and socialism has the benefit of maximizing control of economy and rebuilding. The U.S. too realized the harsh reality that with freedom comes a liberalized look at how to govern both economy and nation. Thus the liberalization of the West for America and Europe had begun well before Harry Truman's handover to Ike Eisenhower.

The American nation, fresh from killing off right wing Nazi zealots, realized that within its own borders a similar stratification of citizenry was at work. The American Jew was black in color and extremely more economically disadvantaged than many Jews in Europe and Russia before World War II. Something had to give.

An era of protest created individuals and skills of activism in the U.S. and gave rise to many of the front runners in the Democratic party over the last few decades.

Similarly other events created another breed of politician.

Worldwide Expansion

Realizing a geographical hurdle in the giant nation of Communist China to the East did nothing to slow down Russian expansion. The Sino-Soviet alliance, while awesomely frightening on paper, was never-the-less another part of the Big Lie. That alliance in fact never amounted to much other than a tacit agreement not to tread on each other and when conflicts in expansion arose, to work them out amicably. So when Soviet world domination met Chinese theater expansion, they both agreed that a communist nation springing up in new places within South and Eastern Asia, was an ideal conclusion to any friction that might occur. The Sino-Soviet expansion quickly showed its face in such places as Northern Korea, Northern Vietnam, and as far East as to become the West...Cuba and South America.

The Korean War was a classic Chinese supported revolution, the North slowly building its forces to a point where invasion of the South could be felt well before it occurred. The conflict was never truly resolved and the demarkation between North and South remains today.

Entry into the American Hemisphere was a huge win-win for the Soviets. By finding an ally in their far-far East, gave the Soviets a staging ground for threatening the West, while at the same time providing a staging ground for movement of resources and subsequent plundering of South America. This also produced the first use of a now familiar theme...anything that produced chaos for the U.S. was good for the Soviets.

JFK refused to allow Russian Missiles in Cuba, resulting in a nearly nuclear confrontation between the Soviets and the U.S.

The Vietnam War saw both Chinese and Russian aid to the North Vietnamese, Russian pilots training North Korean flyers borne in Soviet or Chinese built Soviet fighters. Surface to Air missiles were a similar component of the aid from the Sino-Soviet expansion and fostering of the Communist front.

Ronald Reagan's refusal to give into Soviet Expansion into the American Hemisphere resulted in support for anyone willing to raise up against Socialist governments, with Nicaraqua being a particular festering sore.

The final fall of the Soviet Union brought the Cold War to an end. Or did it?

Funding of Anti-Democratic Causes

The Soviets learned a valuable lesson. It was terribly inefficient to move Russian Troops and machinery around the globe. It was much better to convince others to rally in the Communist-Socialist call and provide for their own weapons of destruction and to create their own diversions for American Democratic ideals.

The answer, then, was to spread the revolution by proxy revolution. Revolutionary idealists such as Che Gueverra and at the time little known Fidel Castro became a central hinge point for conquering the Americas and suddenly the little revolution in little Cuba became a BIG revolution right off shore of America.

Indeed, Soviet funding any sort of anti-American initiatives in the world was thought to be a great multiplier. This left the Soviets in the enviable position of accomplishing their goals while someone else did all the work. Granted it still cost money, and yes, troops and training were a major investment in time and energy, but the payoff hoped to be much larger than the outlay and without stripping the motherland of its own military resources. So while the "West" was engrossed in profit economically, the Soviets and Chinese governments focused on profit in the form of expansion of influence and force multipliers.

The New Cold War

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/3663/thenewvq9.jpg

Today, we are looking at similar conditions in the world. However the geography, at least politically and on the ground, has changed to a different area and different ideologies. Unfortunately for all, the center of attention happens to be the richest in oil, that incredible energy source that has turned nomadic, tribal squabblers into money barons and peddlers of influence.

But aside from the terrain, some of the conditions are very similar to the early days of the Cold War. Powerful nations are still all about consolidation of that power, and yes, hoping for and driving to gain influence. The landscape is more about energy policy than geographical expansion -- no one really wants to own desert ground, they want that which lies under it.

But to categorize our modern conflicts as centered around oil and its being sucked out of the earth is far too simplistic. The real issues are very familiar to anyone living through the Cold War. Ideology still reigns supreme. Only this go around, it is Putin's form of democracy which is going through some alarming changes away from those heady days when the Iron Curtain came down along with the Berlin Wall. And the Europeans are challenged by runaway liberalization that moves them closer to that which they fought so long against only a mere two decades ago. And the real threat, a murderous interpretation of Islam, which is nothing more than an ideology where people mean nothing and Extremist Islamic views trump all. That too seems almost too familiar from the first Cold War ideologies.

It Feels Like the Old Cold War!

This does feel like the first Cold War. In the Middle East, ancient antagonisms have erupted into a worldwide epidemic of violence by a few against everyone. Violence at any time and in asymmetrical form. The world is at War, a world war without boundaries and without an identifiable force of enemies that modern surveillance could identify. It is a war that cannot be denied, yet is often victim to that apathy. No legions of soldiers moving across the landscape, no fleets of ships or squadrons of aircraft to defend against, the new war is about murderers hidden right within their brethren. Thus it takes intellectual prowessness and understanding of the pervasiveness of opposing idealism and the occasional "hit at home" event to move the apathetic to action. Worse, in the Middle East or the heart of Europe or America, the decades of nearly uncontrolled liberalized immigration policies have led to the enemy living and growing in every nation of the world.

Hidden by rights to practice religion, today's dangerous ideology cannot be held back by something as simple as the notion of a geographical line that identified the Iron Curtain. Nor can it be defined by a line on a map that was the trigger point for NATO response. Today's conflict is all about ideology. Yet, many of the old policies have reappeared.

A much weakened Russian influence is once again on the rise. Vladmir Putin, a spy from the dark days of the Cold War recognizes this ground. His colleagues funded covert operations the world over and he understands how spreading influence is a simple matter of supply and demand, Russian style. His predecessors in the Soviet era funded revolutionary anti-Democratic operations daily. Today, Putin is taking the same tact and using it well. He is funding anti-American operations daily, and using the obvious foils and old methods against American desires to spread freedom parallel their efforts in post-World War II Cold War days.

Consider where Russian dollars are going. No longer is there much effort to control the Eastern border of Russia. That is all but a lost cause. Clearly, the Eastern Bloc is anti-Russian in so many areas it is almost frightening. They still feel the ominous presence of Russia on their Eastern border, however, it is a magnitude smaller influence than in the past. Indeed it is the Eastern bloc countries that now are Russia's chief opponents while the old Western Europe sees Russia as a possible benefactor. Thus while Russia caters to the desires and needs of Western Europe, their expansion looks once again at a now open frontier, the Middle East and South Asia.

Russian dollars for expansion are clearly being channeled into the Middle East. Huge arms deals replicate the days of earlier Middle East conflicts between "East and West" and not too coincidentally, the Soviet support is for nations attacking Israel. The Russians are still funding anti-Semitism, and arming up those nations intent upon destroying Israel. This time, however, the nations are those rogue nations with a new goal in mind. Not just satisfied with destroying Israel, these nations are routinely expressing their real sentiment. Replacing governments with those more attuned to their ideals. Sound familiar? Instead of Marxism, Socialism and Communism at work, we have Islamic Extremism bent upon extermination of freedoms the world over. Totalitarian, yes. Discriminatory, absolutely. Lethal, definitely. Chaotic, of course. And right along with old time Russian skullduggery.

And the Russians, as predictable, are "all in!". Anyone who wants nuclear technology can have it from the Russians. Anyone needing modern weaponry to "fight off" Western threats can have it for oil dollars. Worse, vapid, witless European nations have joined the fray, trading their security for oil dollars and nuclear proliferation blood money, and ignoring the alarms bells of new Russian expansion.

Russia is less careful then during the Old Cold War, with public disclosures testifying to a defiant "Bear" supplying guns, explosives and ammunition directly to Hamas, Fatah, and Hezbollah in order to satisfy those group's lust for killing not only Jews, but through the Iraqi War support of Sunni and Shiite insurgents, Iraqi Muslims as well. Russia provides nuclear bomb making facilities to Iran disguised as "peaceful nuclear power" for a nation whose oil supply boggles the mind. Russia's arms sales to Iran and Syria will shortly reach proportions larger than the build up of the Arab states in the sixties. From high tech aircraft to newly developed surface to air missile and radars, the Soviets are in this for the long haul. The Chinese add their own versions of high tech as well, radar sets designed to take away the advantage of stealth technology and surface to surface battlefield missiles sold to Iran and then pointed at the Persian Gulf -- all available for a decade to anyone in the Middle East desiring to resist "American Imperialism".

The rhetoric from the old Cold War is visible today as well. Recently, Vladmir Putin laid down a velvet lined gauntlet by clearly stating it was the Americans who are creating wars and violence in the world, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad extolling Jihad against the Israeli and American aggressors. Once again the police are being called the problem, not the criminals. For those of us paying attention to the world climate during the old Cold War, it is hard to forget Castro parroting various Soviet leaders word for word and right on cue. Today we have Venezueala's Hugo ("Fidel") Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud ("Destory Israel") Ahmadinejad parroting Vladmir Putin. Feels and looks like the same Old Cold War rhetoric, and has the same intent -- to de-popularize the Americans, destabilize the regions at risk, and rationalize their extremist world dominating intent through chaos.

Not So Cold for Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and U.S. Troops Overseas

Before we continue, we should point out that this Cold War is not so cold for many people. Palestinians in Israel have had no let up, and all the Israeli peoples, Jew and Arab alike, live in a constant barrage of insecurity, death, and destruction. Afghanistan remains in turmoil with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda remnents trying to reform into classic nation threatening outfits on the battlefield. In Lebanon, Iranian and Syrian backed Hezbollah continues to thrust at Mariannite Christians, Jew and Muslim alike, fostering the chaos that allows attacks on Israel on a nearly regular basis to occur without the new government's consent. And of course in Iraq, a civil war between Sunni and Shiite, fueled by Syria, Iran, and Russian arms, has created the worst sectarian violence in modern history.

Not so cold this New Cold War.

Of course Putin and Ahmadinejad would have us believe it is all the fault of an out of control United States, and sadly many in the U.S. Congress seem to believe this fantasy. The liberalization of America and the pacification of our Congress places kindness over survival and heaps blame on the U.S. President for standing up to tyranny and murderous intent around the world. This makes America the bad guy, and Putin and Ahmadinejad, the unfortunate victims of American violence.

And while this New Cold War appears to be one-sided, we point out that the real world information on the subject is strikingly dis-similar to the propaganda emanating from the leader of the former Soviet Union.

The Data

Below we identify the nexus of Russian involvement in the Middle East. It is an astounding replication of Cold War opposition to American and other "Western" nations' efforts to deny worldwide, anti-democratic ideological tyranny. We should note that any weapons that wind up in Iraq or Afghanistan will wind up killing American or other Coaltion soldiers as well as Iraqis and Afghanis of any sort and description. Weapons that proceed south through Lebanon wind up killing Israelis AND the opposite faction's supporters in the Occupied Territories (Hamas vs. Fatah and both vs. the Israelis).

http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/3162/iranit3.jpg

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/4886/syriakz6.jpg

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/5553/hezbollahec9.jpg

http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/3453/hamasxe0.jpg

Conclusion

So who is the source of violence and wars in the World? The U.S.? Hardly. What Putin and his proxies want you to believe is that their murderous chaos intended to destroy democracy in the Middle East is all the fault of the country invested in preventing wholesale slaughter and the overthrow of democratic governments. That too is familiar from the Old Cold War. The good guys are being painted to be the bad guys. This go around, far too many people are buying the nonsense that it is all America's fault. Our own left wing media is part of the problem, with Europe's media AND governments contributing through lliberal bias, apathy and indecision.

CCIP

12-16-07, 09:59 PM

Hello Russophobia. The conspiracy theorists are here and they love ya :-?

SUBMAN1

12-16-07, 10:01 PM

I only wish it were a conspiracy theory. :cry:

-S

CCIP

12-16-07, 10:09 PM

Personally I don't see anything surprising about vying for spheres of influence, and I again repeat: Russia has as much right to one as any power of its size. It's simply re-asserting it.

There is some truth here but I think a lot of these links are far from as explicit as it suggests. I don't think we can argue that Russia is messing with things and often doing all of us a big dis-favour, but I don't think there's any room in Putin's plans for seriously destabilizing the world.

Which is why I call on Russophobia so much - there are many ways in which Russia could still be engaged (NOT appeased, mind you). A lot of what's being done to counter Russian resurgence is completely counterproductive because it excites the paranoia of the outside world that's both historically inherent and socio-politically inevitable in a nation that lived through such a traumatic 20th century.

By the way, I'd like to find some translation for numerous Russian articles that suggest that the US/NATO is manuevering around Russian interests and supporting various causes that undermine these. Based on what, to me, is much more compelling evidence than this. I think both sides are playing dirty. Russia is more sneaky and two-faced, the US is more butt-headedly idealistic (in a world which doesn't need that) and openly militant. I don't know which is worse, but if they don't wake up and do something to defuse things a bit I don't see a lot of good resulting from all this. But it's not merely up to Russia to stop this.

Chock

12-16-07, 10:27 PM

That's a somewhat biased article, one only has to look at the diagrams to see that; whilst the diagram is accurate as far as it goes, where are the arrows pointing from the US flag at Angola, Turkey, Vietnam etc, etc? (If I list them all we'll run out of room for flags) or the ones pointing from Israel at the several arabic nations it has launched attacks on? There could be lots more arrows pointing from allsorts of other flags too, but to be totally fair they ought to all be on there and not just the ones from 'big bad nasty Russia', if anyone is going to do a diagram painting themself as the man in the white hat, they ought to endeavor to be truthful at least.

Whether you like Putin or not, the overtures from the US have indeed encouraged nations to get nuclear and conventional weapons in order to prevent attack, there's no doubt about that. Witness the way the United States backed off from its intitial threats toward North Korea when they started demonstrating weaponry with considerable capabilities, it's a similar story with Iran too, one whiff of that diesel sub and suddenly it's all quiet on the Middle Eastern front as far as the Bush administration's overtures towards Iran have been in recent weeks.

It takes at least two sides to have a war, even a cold one.

:D Chock

Stealth Hunter

12-17-07, 01:11 AM

Uhm, I feel like a bit of a traitor for saying this, but...

... assuming power becomes a problem, I'm going home. WE DEMAND SUBSIM AND WE SHALL GET IT!

Hakahura

12-17-07, 03:00 PM

CCIP

12-17-07, 03:22 PM

From Subman's post...

"The Russians are still funding anti-Semitism, and arming up those nations intent upon destroying Israel."

(Sorry but there's no way I'm quoting all of a post that long)

Hey maybe it's just business.

If the Ford corner the market selling pickup trucks in Tel Aviv, are Dodge doing anything wrong selling their pickups in Damascus?
I think that's just paranoia to be honest, and the author's bias clearly showing. There is anti-semitism in Russia, but the government's position has been pretty strongly against it and it has been fairly functional. For what it's worth, Putin's little youth movement ("Nashi") explicitly labels themselves "anti-fascist".

It's indeed business, and more than just the commercial kind of business. I don't think Russia is at all averse to making the US dump more money into military aid to Israel. Giving them a taste of their own medicine, perhaps - after all, the US did manage to bankrupt the Soviets by making their military ambitions financially unsupportable. That said, I think they're playing a dangerous game with Iran and Syria which I certainly don't sympathise with.

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 03:25 PM

There are constant shows of force. Even the bomber flights have started again and are ramping up.

To call it paranoia is a bit of a misnomer - it is happening.

-S

CCIP

12-17-07, 03:45 PM

geetrue

12-17-07, 05:07 PM

Paper puppet or President of the Russian Federation?

"If our people, Russian citizens, place their trust in Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev and elect him as the new president of the Russian Federation, I'll be ready to continue work as head of the government without changing the distribution of powers between the presidency and government,'' Putin said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a_meAel6sAlM&refer=home

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 05:14 PM

What's so unusual about bomber flights? There's nothing unprecedented about military units on patrol in or over the seas. Everyone does it, not the least the US; I think the collapse of the 90s was the exception for the Russians.

Any aspiring first-rate power, let alone one that has the capacity to be one, has their shows of force.

Look on the flipside - Russians are flying bombers over the seas, dropping nothing. Various western nations have no trouble flying bombers and dropping bombs of Afghanistan or Iraq. I fail to see why the former is called "show of force".

I think it's all the usual case of "What's allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to a bull." :hmm:Hmm... What so non aggressive about sending bomber flights to US soil to test defences and scrambling times? That is completely harmless I guess and maybe the US should send B-1's and B-2's to Russian soil to test its response time too, no? :p:p :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

-S

PS. I assume if we did, Russia would call it an act of war!

STEED

12-17-07, 05:46 PM

Well with oil on a down slope nothing like kicking things off nice and early, I'm going to make a killing selling bows & arrows for WW4. :p

Chock

12-17-07, 05:50 PM

maybe the US should send B-1's and B-2's to Russian soil to test its response time too, no?
They already are doing and have been doing so for years over the Black Sea, why do you think they have an airbase at Incirlik with a 10,000 foot long runway?

:D Chock

CCIP

12-17-07, 05:56 PM

Over US soil? I have not read about this one. Would be happy with report links!

(Not that I can't imagine it, but all reports I've read had the bombers over the sea heading for that or other territory, then turning back before reaching it...)

DeepIron

12-17-07, 06:01 PM

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." ~ A. Einstein

Tchocky

12-17-07, 06:02 PM

XabbaRus

12-17-07, 06:10 PM

Ah please subman this is crazy.

Give me proof that Russian bombers have violated US airspace? Even after the cold war I'm pretty sure US bombers where probing Russian airspace. Sems very much like a case of the US can do it but Russia can't and if it does it's bad.

Also why would Iran be supplying the Sunni muslims in Iraq? Iran are shiites so would have thought they would be supplying them and the Syrians the Sunnis.

Going back a few decades didn't IBM and the Bush family supply the Nazis? I seem to remember the Bush family supplying the ingerdient for cyklon gas...

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 06:25 PM

Don't turn a blind eye. And no, we wouldn't dare send any bombers into Soviet airspace back in the cold war - they shoot them down, including airliners that stray too close to Russian airspace. Didn't this happen twice?

Anyway, the Russians are back to probing US air defences. I'd call this a hostile act.

In last week's incident near Guam, the Russian pilots "exchanged smiles" with US fighter pilots who scrambled to track them, a Russian general said.

The US military confirmed the presence of the Russian bombers near Guam, home to a large US base.

Last month two Tupolev 95 aircraft - dubbed "bears" according to their Nato code-name - strayed south from their normal patrol pattern off the Norwegian coast and headed towards Scotland. Two RAF Tornado fighters were sent up to meet them.

Russian bombers have also recently flown close to US airspace over the Arctic Ocean near Alaska.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6950986.stm

Mr. Bacon's comments appeared designed to pre-empt a Russian claim to have penetrated American air defenses off Alaska. Twice this fall Russian warplanes flew near the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in the Sea of Japan and afterward released photographs showing that they had approached the carrier.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505EEDA103DF932A35751C1A9669C8B 63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/P/Politics%20and%20Government

Tell me how many you want? Google is full of them.

-S

Chock

12-17-07, 06:32 PM

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 06:40 PM

Again both sides do this sort of thing, and have done in the past, just off the top of my head you've got Iran Air flight 655 shot down by the USS Vincennes, and Gary Powers' U2 being downed over Russian territory.

:D ChockNot a nuke bomber. Much bigger difference.

Recon is not a hostile bomber flight.

And Irans jet was mistaken by the Aegis system and automatically locked on and shot at. This is what put a man on the trigger in an Aegis environment to prevent it from happening again. Accident vs a deliberate act are two very different things.

-S

Chock

12-17-07, 06:50 PM

Oh please, what do you think it was performing recon for, Google Earth?

Don't get me wrong, I know Russia's moves are provocative, I'm just saying they aren't the only ones at it.

:D Chock

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 06:53 PM

Oh please, what do you think it was performing recon for, Google Earth?

Don't get me wrong, I know Russia's moves are provocative, I'm just saying they aren't the only ones at it.

:D ChockRecon is something that is considered to be important for all parties that are potentially hostile. Russia recons on the US on a daily basis. This is normal so that one party can know what the other is up to. These actually has the side effect of calming nerves, especially ones on the button. Recon is a neccesary thing.

I have no problem with Russia doing recon on the US - fine, send a recon aircraft. Sending a bomber that possibly has a nuke on board is night and day here.

So don't give me the oh please part.

-S

August

12-17-07, 08:04 PM

Witness the way the United States backed off from its intitial threats toward North Korea when they started demonstrating weaponry with considerable capabilities

Attacking NK means war with China. You don't really believe NKs military capability would be a serious deterrent to the US do you?

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-17-07, 09:04 PM

I have no problem with Russia doing recon on the US - fine, send a recon aircraft. Sending a bomber that possibly has a nuke on board is night and day here. -S

If all you got for long range are bombers, that's what you use for long-range recce.

While we are on this, remember when the US sent subs into Soviet waters (they almost certainly still do in Russian waters). Are you going to say to the US, "recce is fine, but use special, unarmed subs"?

Or how about when they sent USS Yorktown (which has Tomahawk firing ability) into Soviet waters around 1988 for the "right of innocent passage" in a place and then mumble some interpreted legalese that ostensibly justifies it (and there is no way you can convince anyone Yorktown was not doing some intel-gathering on the side being so close to the Soviet coast) . Are you going to say to the US "asserting the right to innocent passage is fine, but use unarmed ships without recce ability?"

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-17-07, 09:12 PM

Not a nuke bomber. Much bigger difference.

Recon is not a hostile bomber flight.

And Irans jet was mistaken by the Aegis system and automatically locked on and shot at. This is what put a man on the trigger in an Aegis environment to prevent it from happening again. Accident vs a deliberate act are two very different things.

-S

ROFTLMAO. That is completely, 180 degrees from the investigation result. In fact, Aegis saw the whole thing clearly, much more clearly than the Soviet PVO radar net saw KAL007. The entire CIC crew aboard saw the reverse watching the screens. Zocher (a contender for the most incompetent officer ever created even in a rather incompetent crew) failed to perform the correct button-pushing drill to lock up the target (this is conscript stuff here) and finally they decided to shoot it down.

The Aegis system will not be able to fire on its own decision anyway, unless humans turn a key to allow it to fire automatically. So don't try and blame the system. It was a deliberate act. Period.

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 09:15 PM

Lets see, Akulas in Puget Sound, or so Russia claims.

in 1988, no Tomahawks had nuke capability anymore, so the point being? Lets add, it sounds like a humanitarian mission anyway.

And you are telling me that Russia has no other capability than Nuke laden bombers to fly to US airspace? :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:Highly doubt it.

No points taken. Recon is not the issues as stated above. The difference here is an aggressive act. I would 'LOVE' to see the Russian reaction to a B-1 probing Russian defenses. An act of war - gauranteed. This is not a bomber sitting at strategic points in the ocean, well outside of the 12 mile range, this is a nuclear bomber specifically heading towards the coast of the US of A.

-S

PS. Oh I forgot - this is not a one time deal like the Yorktown - this is a daily thing.

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 09:17 PM

Tchocky

12-17-07, 09:24 PM

ROFTLMAO. That is completely, 180 degrees from the investigation result. In fact, Aegis saw the whole thing clearly, much more clearly than the Soviet PVO radar net saw KAL007. The entire CIC crew aboard saw the reverse watching the screens. Zocher (a contender for the most incompetent officer ever created even in a rather incompetent crew) failed to perform the correct button-pushing drill to lock up the target (this is conscript stuff here) and finally they decided to shoot it down.

The Aegis system will not be able to fire on its own decision anyway, unless humans turn a key to allow it to fire automatically. So don't try and blame the system. It was a deliberate act. Period.Where is your proof? The point is, you don't have any. This is purely an assumption on your part. Case closed.

-S Case closed? Can you support the theory that it happened automatically, or is it "purely an assumption" on your part?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Shootdown

See if there is anything there that supports the "automatic" argument. Or anywhere else.
From here - http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Aeronautics-and-Astronautics/16-422Spring2004/40763DF2-1797-48D5-9D5C-136DFE8D43C7/0/vincennes.pdf
The weapons officer, Zocher, pressed the wrong keys over twenty times before a superior officer fired the missiles. Manually. Doesn't sound automatic.

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-17-07, 09:26 PM

Lets see, Akulas in Puget Sound, or so Russia claims.
Since the Americans are doing the same, I'm not saying it is wrong. However, by your arguments, it is an act of war.

in 1988, no Tomahawks had nuke capability anymore, so the point being? Lets add, it sounds like a humanitarian mission anyway.
Actually, they were on until 27 Sep 1991 (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/theater/slcm.htm).

And you are telling me that Russia has no other capability than Nuke laden bombers to fly to US airspace? :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:Highly doubt it.
Take a list of long-range military aircraft Russia has, and note how they are all bombers or bomber variants.

No points taken. Recon is not the issues as stated above. The difference here is an aggressive act. I would 'LOVE' to see the Russian reaction to a B-1 probing Russian defenses. An act of war - gauranteed. This is not a bomber sitting at strategic points in the ocean, well outside of the 12 mile range, this is a nuclear bomber specifically heading towards the coast of the US of A.
Well, most likely, they'll scramble, identify the plane as a B-1, and take an escort position. If it gets an inch into Russian territory, they shoot it down. Otherwise, it is just life.

The US intrusions into Russian waters by subs is a fairly regular occurrence too.

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-17-07, 09:28 PM

baggygreen

12-17-07, 09:33 PM

Look at some motives behind the actions tho.

Putin is old-school, soviet-trained KGB. He remembers a time when the west trembled at night for fear of thousands of tanks rolling through the fulda gap, when the ground shook to the marching boots of a million combat-ready men.

FastForward to 2002ish, the west looks at russia and laughs.

Imagine how much this must dent Putins pride. The man grew up in a nation which was feared throughout the world, if they said jump the response was how high. They had in the space of 10 years from powerful to laughable. Of course he'd want to turn it around. A growth in the abilities and equipment of Russias armed forces was always inevitable. I dont think its something to be concerned about. What Russia ultimately fears i think is China.

Which brings me along nicely. China is a nation that has not in living memory been a 'great power' like Russia, the US or even Germany or Britain. They aspire to it though, and who can blame them? The past however long they've been subjugated by foreigners, one after another. the Chinese are a proud people, and this hurts them. People recognise what russia can do, cos they've done it before. Noone knows what china can do, including themselves, and this is the real concern.

*****(simple analogy, dont take offence anyone)*****
How does a kid in the schoolyard show that they're bigger and tougher than the 2 biggest bullies? By beating them up, and proving your tougher.

Thats the real problem.

The only way that China will feel they've attained superpower status is by giving the others a bloody nose.

To do this, China needs resources by land. Hence the niceness to Iran! If they get oil overland rather than shipping it in like at present, there goes one potential weapon to use against them - blockade. next they need money. Best way to earn money is control valuable resources. Oh, look - theres trillions of dollars worth of resources just over the border in.... RUSSIA! Anyone see trouble brewing yet??

Now i said before that the Chinese are a proud people. one of their biggest sore-points is taiwan. if they have overland supplies, and control an immense amount of wealth, does anyone think they wont try taking on taiwan? Sure, the US might try intervene but if they ask their pals the iranians to help out and stir some trouble, you got 2 hotspots which the US cant ignore. overstretching them, that makes life easier on the chinese.

So anyways, conclusion: the west has nothing to fear from Russia, but both russia and the west have everything to fear from china. Russias flights, shows of power are a warning to china, a deterrent, saying we still have the means to hurt you. I think its in the wests interests to try work much more closely with russia, i really think thats going to be the key to avoiding all sorts of nasty problems in the next 20 or 30 years.

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 09:37 PM

Where is your proof? The point is, you don't have any. This is purely an assumption on your part. Case closed.

-S
Here. The Official DoD Investigation. (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ir655-dod-report.html)First off, I question the validity of this report. Please post form a US government website. Not someone's homepage that probably modified it to their own end. This is probably an Iranian for all I know.

Second, the system is purely automated. A similar system exists in the form of a Patriot missile. It makes a mistake on occasion as evident that we shot down one of our own F-18's - accidently, and automatically without human intervention during 2003.

So, please find me another source.

Thx,

-S

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 09:40 PM

Little things like this make me further discount it as credible - sounds like Iranian propoganda.

The felony-murder (http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1111.html), or manslaughter (http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1112.html), of the mostly American victims of Pan Am 103, bombed a few months later (December 21 1988, 270 victims), a promised, foreseeable, apparent, international countermeasure to the first criminal enterprise, the conspiracy of criminal liars, who decided to lie, and falsely deny responsibility, on behalf of the United States, thereupon legalizing an eye for an eye (a species of self-defense).

Tchocky

12-17-07, 09:45 PM

Please post form a US government website. Not someone's homepage that probably modified it to their own end. This is probably an Iranian for all I know.

http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA203577

Got the pdf from this link.

August

12-17-07, 09:45 PM

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 09:52 PM

Please post form a US government website. Not someone's homepage that probably modified it to their own end. This is probably an Iranian for all I know.
http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA203577

Got the pdf from this link.That one is good. It puts things into perspective.

-S

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 09:56 PM

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/813/iran1pk3.gif
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7020/iran2fo2.gif

That pretty much sums it up. it was a tragedy, not a deliberate act to down an airliner.

-S

Zachstar

12-17-07, 10:12 PM

Subman. It is obvious to me that you have allowed yourself to be twisted into fear by these terrorists and their supporters. Your posts do nothing but help them. Please stop!

By posting this stuff you are allowing them to win. They want us to live in fear of them. To form conspiricy theories, point fingers, do stupid acts, panic, discriminate, lay down our freedoms for security. Abandon allies, Etc... Etc.. Our economy is heading down the crapper and you dare post this crap? Just who do you want to win the war on terrorism?

You know who people like you are really allowing to win? China! China is just loving us tearing ourselves apart economically and spritulally over dem terrorists! They have been on hot standby for years waiting for us to collapse economically. Except this time their goods are not so crap anymore. The more we allow ourselves to show our fear like this, The more china will influence us.

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 10:17 PM

Kraut

12-17-07, 10:21 PM

ZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Zachstar

12-17-07, 10:26 PM

Absolutely not!

What I am saying is that THIS crap. THIS fear is the stuff that aids them in the end. THIS crap is what they want!

This whole topic did nothing but incite fear and anger. Compare that to what those evil people want. What China wants. What is killing the economy.

Chock

12-17-07, 10:33 PM

This whole topic did nothing but incite fear and anger

Not with me it didn't

:D Chock

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 10:33 PM

I don't agree. I like to hear their opinions. Each and every one of them here, even though it doesn't look like it at times (including Skybird), I'd love to sit down and have a beer with them. What you are looking at is world opinions. It is educational to see how the rest of the world sees you, and to have an argument over visions. It shows a lot of how people from various countries view certain situations.

I've never been one to walk the fine line of political correctness. You never get the truth that way.

-S

Zachstar

12-17-07, 10:39 PM

You have to understand that right now. The economy is EVERYTHING! With oil prices running higher every year and the call of overseas jobs. The last thing the economy needs is talk of another cold war and conspiricy theories and other crap.

They need to feel that things are getting better, that the world is stabilizing, and that we truely have the terrorists beat. When you post such crap and it gets back to them through rumor and other means. They become frightful and that causes losses on the stock market and other aspects.

The USA will not outlast another depression. We WILL be bought out. So STOP. Have faith, be nice and support peace and unity. The alternative is more fears and more years of economic ruin.

I grew out of the phase of finger pointing and accepted that the economy as it is now (Pre-Fusion) is much more important than assuming anything.

Chock

12-17-07, 10:42 PM

I've been playing devil's advocate on this one to be sure, but how is a Tu-95 physically patrolling off your shoreline a conspiracy 'theory'?

:D Chock

baggygreen

12-17-07, 11:00 PM

zachstar, are you basically saying that the US populous need to be lied to, to be patted on the back and told 'there there, it'll be ok'?:hmm:

Zachstar

12-17-07, 11:07 PM

No

I am saying that this crap is unwarranted and harms. Unless you got word of a SERIOUS threat and direct proof that a country such as russia is planning some sort of attack or 3rd party attack DIRECT proof. Then this is all pointless and just harms the economy.

Consider this. Everything you think you know the Bush administration knows. I trust that the president or the military will not hide critical info from us.

This is a time when one needs to just sit down and accept that the world sucks and only faith will get us through this. Otherwise you will live with a massive case of paranoia.

DeepIron

12-17-07, 11:09 PM

What I am saying is that THIS crap. THIS fear is the stuff that aids them in the end. THIS crap is what they want!

This whole topic did nothing but incite fear and anger. Compare that to what those evil people want. What China wants. What is killing the economy.
@Zachstar... Dude, you need to seriously get a grip...

It's pretty doubtful that any of the opinions or discussions in this forum will be used as propaganda in the war on terror or otherwise. If these type of posts bother or scare you, perhaps you shouldn't read them... :shifty:

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-17-07, 11:11 PM

Here. The Official DoD Investigation. (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ir655-dod-report.html)
Um, no that's bits and pieces of the DoD investigation with extensive commentary by someone trying to make a point.
I've compared the two documents. The two obviously are slightly different versions of the same document - Harwood site fuses the 1993 document (with many more details) and the 1988 version (since there were some deletions as well), but a quick glance suggests no reason to believe anything was actually changed beyond the differences b/w the 1993 and 1988 versions (PDF).

The Letter Memorandum, First and Second endorsements are placed in the front of the PDF, and near the bottom of Harwood's document. Let's go in the PDF's order and look at the Letter first.

Letter: identical.
Memorandum: Identical

2nd Endorsement
Paragraph 1: Identical.
Paragraph 2: Identical.
Paragraph 2b: Identical.
Paragraph 2c: The clearly blanked spot in the PDF has been filled in, but there seems no reason not to believe it isn't the 1993 version. The added spot is clearly delineated in Green underlining.
Paragraph 2d: Identical.
Paragraph 2e: Identical.
Paragraph 2f: Identical.
Paragraph 3: Identical in its entirety.
Paragraph 4a: Identical
Paragraph 4b: Identical
Paragraph 4c: The missing word in the 1988 report is apparently "Maverick".
Paragraph 4d: Identical.
Paragraph 5: Identical in its entirety.
Paragraph 6: Identical in its entirety.
Paragraph 7: Identical in its entirety.
Paragraph 8: The symbology seems to say Paragraph 8 is not in the 1993 version. In any case, the quoted text is identical to the PDF. The remainder is also identical.

Need I go on?

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 11:13 PM

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-17-07, 11:21 PM

Its not an official source. The official one is clear cut. That one has all sort of crap loaded in. No thx!

-S
So? Does it mean is lying? The man clearly delineates (painstakingly) all the large and little differences b/w the 1993 and 1988 documents. It is your responsibility, if you wish to say he's lying, to come up with specific objections.

As for the "crap", you mean the commentary. I personally find it helpful that the guy juxtaposes other feeds during the document, so you are constantly aware of them. As long as he doesn't rewrite the DoD document (or the other feeds) itself, I see no reason to discredit it.

SUBMAN1

12-17-07, 11:28 PM

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-17-07, 11:49 PM

Enigma

12-18-07, 12:49 AM

This is incredible.

As an American: Can I point out that we have no fly zones established over foreign ground, we currently occupy 2 foreign nations, we have military installations across the globe, we have enough fire power in the Persian Gulf to destroy a large nation several times over, and you think that some Ruskie flying an old bear somwhere near Guam is reason to believe that the Russians are going to be responsible for WWIII?

:doh:

XabbaRus

12-18-07, 04:56 AM

About these Russian flights.

One, they don't penetrate airspace, all the reports say approached US airspace, UK airspace. The bombers are then intercepted BEFORE they reach sovereign airspace, it's SOP. Russia doesn't have recon aircraft per se, but I bet their bombers have useful SIGINT kit on them hence they send them. Is it aggressive, maybe, I don't see the problem with it. How do you know the US hasn't flown B-1 bombers towards Russian airspace? NATO forces probe Russian airspace all the time, testing defences etc, it's standard procedure, see what the other guy can do.

You need to get a grip...all it is is Russia showing they are flying again not some conspiracy to take out the US. Give me evidence that Russian bombers have been in US airspace, and I mean penetrated, not just skirted round it. I also like the way to use the work 'probe' when talking about US aircraft but with the Russians you just state the went in.

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 01:08 PM

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 01:16 PM

Where are both from federal sources? I see one. I do not see this second one. Then we can make a judgement. -S
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/reading_room/172.pdf

A quick check says the changes in Paragraph 2c and 4c of the 2nd Endorsement is matched in the 1993 PDF. Paragraph 8 has indeed been blacked out for mysterious reasons in the 1993 edition.

Hmm, seems like it is reliable. Which it should be. With both versions being in public circulation on the Internet, it is excessively risky for even the most partisan person to deny it.

Now how about stopping this Authentication Delay game and get on to real Discussion?Good - now we have official documents. So you say this was a deliberate act (The very reason I am arguing with you on a minor point almost off topic). Well, hate to say, it wasn't. So quit making it out like the US did this deliberatly. Here is your answer from the PDF. If I had to guess, Iran deliberately made it look like an F-14 so that they could create an international incident.

http://img108.imageshack.us/img108/2751/iran1nk0.gif
http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/5937/iran2ad0.gif

Tchocky

12-18-07, 01:27 PM

So the Russian claims that they penetrated our airspace is not enough of a red flag for you? They say they have. There is a good chance they may have. What is wrong with this idea? I can't find anything that says they penetrated US airspace. That's more or less what is wrong with this idea. It's not supported. "A good chance"? How about evidence.

Closest I can find

http://doska.co.uk/eng/lofiversion/index.php/t150.html
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Russian_bombers_getting_closer_to_US_American_comm ander_999.html

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 01:32 PM

geetrue

12-18-07, 01:40 PM

I guess I'm thinking that Russia is getting tired of being made to play third fiddle to america and china. My biggest worry is for europe. They are at the whim of Russia when it comes to energy, and look how close europe is to russia. And we are afraid of the mexicans?

I think when it comes to russia prudence is the best coarse.

It's just the other way around (highlighted part).

Russia needs the European market to grow, to pay for their new war toys, plus they need to have a stock market with vigor. Russia needs customers.

Threats give Putin power ... his army will never march on Europe.

Why? Because Russians like shopping for new clothes, buying expensive things and being more comfortable like the Europeans have been for years before prosperity came to the mother land ... :yep:

Tchocky

12-18-07, 01:45 PM

Um, yup. Still can't find anything about airspace penetration. Lots of "near", "almost", and speak of "air defenses". Nothing about overflights of territory.

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 02:07 PM

Um, yup. Still can't find anything about airspace penetration. Lots of "near", "almost", and speak of "air defenses". Nothing about overflights of territory.Blind.

Tchocky

12-18-07, 02:14 PM

Um, yup. Still can't find anything about airspace penetration. Lots of "near", "almost", and speak of "air defenses". Nothing about overflights of territory.Blind.
I am dictating this post, now I know how Milton felt.

Blind? Then show me where it says that Russian bombers violated US airspace. I'll get the nurse to read it aloud.

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 02:17 PM

Um, yup. Still can't find anything about airspace penetration. Lots of "near", "almost", and speak of "air defenses". Nothing about overflights of territory.Blind. I am dictating this post, now I know how Milton felt.

Blind? Then show me where it says that Russian bombers violated US airspace. I'll get the nurse to read it aloud.Hmm - seems I am having more fun watching you fumble than pointing it out. So, nah!

-S

Tchocky

12-18-07, 02:20 PM

...right.

Answer posts 15 and 18 then. Same question.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=723867&postcount=15
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=723867&postcount=18

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 02:34 PM

Let's put it this way - I'm bored with the discussion. I am posting in other threads. If you can't figure it out, then fine, I'm not going to help you. Come up with something interesting to discuss, then I'll be back.

-S

Fish

12-18-07, 04:54 PM

baggygreen

12-18-07, 06:43 PM

Noone thought anything of my suggestion that Russia and the west needa cooperate, and that the russkies are aiming these flights indirectly at the chinese???:cry: That took me ages to write up at work..:know:

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-18-07, 08:51 PM

So the Russian claims that they penetrated our airspace is not enough of a red flag for you? They say they have. There is a good chance they may have. What is wrong with this idea? -S

I can't see the proof you produced, but there was supposedly a Tu-160 that penetrated (http://en.rian.ru/russia/20060422/46792049.html) American airspace. Definitely aggressive. But then, the Americans sent U-2s until SAMs started reaching them, and they send in subs whenever they think they can get away with it. I'm not moved.

CCIP

12-18-07, 09:15 PM

This thread so far has only given me one random thought.

While I certainly do NOT mean any Nazi comparisons here, I just wonder if it would help if some of our over-enthusiastic American friends asked the main question joked about in the beginning of this classic: http://youtube.com/watch?v=SO5WoLnOOlU

:hmm:

Russians have a good expression - "Two boots are a pair".

Ultimately in the original argument all I see for logic is the assumption that, well, the Russians are the bad guys and the yanks are the good guys. It's a baseless assumption, save for the basis in perceived superiority. Well, I'm spelling it out for you: it takes two sides to have any kind of war, let alone a Cold one. And as in the first one, I am seeing America on a fast-track to escalating it. And this time there's not even any evil commies to point fingers at!

Russia and the US have a lot in common. Both are run by what purport to be perfectly democratic regimes elected by an increasingly low turnout of voters. In Russia's case political apathy and the ability of a large ex-KGB contingent to take over governing structures has stemmed from a large socioeconomic divide existing in the society. Pushing Russia into isolation will only further reinforce this divide. In America's case, this divide is infinitely milder but it's growing as well. It's by no means safe from its own major military business and the military-industrial complex. Spoiling relations with other people and making others wary of your overly-militant position won't do you much good either.

I agree with Zachstar. The economy is everything. The real losers in this will be the US economy and the average Russian. I think you should have at least as much interest in the former as I do in the latter. Another cold war will be devastating to one or both. Neither can simply be dismissed as trifle. If you do, again, I point to baseless assumptions of superiority, and these are downright dangerous. Then perhaps the Nazi comparison WOULD suddenly gain some validity...

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-18-07, 09:41 PM

Good - now we have official documents. So you say this was a deliberate act (The very reason I am arguing with you on a minor point almost off topic). Well, hate to say, it wasn't. So quit making it out like the US did this deliberatly. Here is your answer from the PDF. If I had to guess, Iran deliberately made it look like an F-14 so that they could create an international incident.

http://img108.imageshack.us/img108/2751/iran1nk0.gif
http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/5937/iran2ad0.gif

The decision to shoot down the plane came from an American ship captain, thus it was a deliberate act. Even if it was a F-14, and it was attacking the Vincennes directly, shooting it down is a deliberate act. If a missile misfired or stupid Zocher stabbed the wrong button and the missile fired (given his fumbling, he'd never switch the illuminator off in time), it is an accident. Got it?

You are quoting from the 2nd endorsement, rather than from the report itself, but never mind. In the 2nd endorsement, to say in the opinion of the then Joint Chief of Staff.

(U) On the morning of 3 July, Montgomery observed seven IRGC small boats approaching a Pakistani vessel.

This assertion has apparently been challenged by the Pakistani vessel's Captain.

n the midst of this highly charged environment, an unknown aircraft took off from a joint military/civilian airport on a flight path headed directly toward Vincennes and Montgomery.

So making sure which is which is your responsibility.

This was the same airfield from which Iran had launched F-4’s in support of an attack on U.S. naval forces on 18 April and from which Iran had repeatedly launched F-14 fighter aircraft during the prior week. This unknown aircraft was 27 minutes behind any scheduled commercial airline departure from Bandar Abbas airport.

It would hardly have been the first plane that took its time getting from the gate to the runway... as Harwood points out, and as anybody who has taken a plane flight no doubt experienced.

Although it was flying within a known commercial air corridor, it was off the centerline some 3 or 4 miles, which was not the usual centerline profile for commercial air traffic previously monitored by Vincennes.

Harwood has a nice one here too, the guy was flying without the INS because it was so short.

Moreover, its mid-range altitude was consistent with either a hostile or commercial aircraft.

It was climbing ... you moron ...

(U) Vincennes could detect no radar emanations from the contact which might identify it, but was reading a Mode III IFF squawk.

Amazing, so you were reading it as a COMAIR.

This situation {p.4} {p.4-1988} was confused somewhat when a Mode II IFF squawk was detected and the aircraft was identified as an F-14.

Oh, they heard one little squawk, and immediately they identified a previously neutral target as a hostile. They even had the gall to call it a F-14... the ability of Americans to jump to conclusions is unparalelled.

Complicating the picture was an Iranian P-3 (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/p-3.htm) to the west which was in excellent position to furnish targeting information to an attacking aircraft.

Considering you are sinking their boats, that they are taking an interest in you is understandable.

More importantly, the unknown contact continued at a gradually increasing speed on a course headed toward Vincennes and Montgomery.

It was climbing and you were sitting under the airway, what did you expect.

It failed to respond to repeated challenges from Vincennes over both the military and international emergency distress frequencies.

Harwood discusses this in great detail.

The Captain was in a genuine dilemma. On one hand the threatening contact was closing about 5-6 miles a minute. On the other, he had to act quickly to defend his ship and crew before the contact got much closer than 10 miles (in order to give himself fire depth and to stay outside of Maverick (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/agm-65.htm) range). By the time he learned of the potential threat, his decision time was less than 5 minutes.

Has he tried, for example, getting out of the way. In 5 minutes, a ship at 32 knots can move 6000 yards. That's enough to get out of a CB unless the plane also manuevers.

The 2nd endorsement also contained some gems as.

Was it a critical error? No. Even if the Commanding Officer had been informed that there was no Mode II indication, that information alone has little significance. An attacker could easily be either squawking Mode III or no mode if believes it will camouflage his identity.

In other words, screaming that you are a commercial makes little difference to the egocentric American thought process.

The Commanding Officer did not put emphasis on the air corridor being 20 miles wide. In fact, his experience in the Gulf suggested that commercial aircraft normally tried hard to stay directly on the center line. He believed that 3 to 4 miles off the center axis was unusual and should be considered. In actual fact, however, it is again a peripheral point. An attacker would probably prefer to be in an air corridor if it confused his target. The Persian Gulf is blanketed by air corridors; they cover over 50% of the Gulf. Being in an air corridor is secondary information at best and must be combined with altitude, voice transmissions, etc., to be conclusive.

Despite his earlier whine about the plane being a few miles off the center, now this man says it should make little difference to an American's thinking process.

It is impossible to say with assurance how the decreasing altitude information bore on the Commanding Officer’s final decision. Obviously, whether the aircraft was ascending or descending could, when taken in the overall context, be a “significant indicator.” It should be borne in mind, however, that an aircraft even at a range of 9 miles and altitude of 13,000+ feet (actual altitude at time of firing) was at sufficiently low {p.6} {p.6-1988} altitude that it could attack Vincennes within the next 9 miles. On the other hand, the report that the altitude was decreasing could possibly have further confirmed a developing decision to fire. The Commanding Officer testified that it was only one piece of information among many. In this reviewing officer’s opinion, it is unlikely that this one piece of information would have settled the issue one way or another given the uncertainties that remained and the extremely short time left.

Am I the only person getting a feeling that what the Airbus does or does not do (except for not taking off) makes little difference?

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 09:53 PM

OK - you are confusing the issue. What I mean by a deliberate act is shooting down an 'airliner' deliberately. Shooting down the F-14 - fine, that is what the Aegis is supposed to do.

If you go back to original statements, you were claiming that the Americans intended to shoot down the Airbus, and for what? Civilian casualties? That is the beef here. This is not what happened. You can find no proof to back up this claim either.

This is purely an anti American propaganda with no proof - just black propaganda.

-S

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 09:57 PM

For CCIP - the idea is growing across America and the World. Here is more on the subject. How many you want?

-S

The New American Cold War

Stephen F. Cohen (http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/stephen_f_cohen)

(http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/stephen_f_cohen)
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article--originally published in the July 10, 2006, issue of The Nation--appears with a new introduction by the author restating his analyses and arguments in the context of recent developments.

Two reactions to this article were particularly noteworthy when it first appeared in The Nation almost exactly one year ago. Judging by activity on the magazine's website and by responses sent to me personally, it was very widely read and discussed both in the United States and in Russia, where it was quickly translated on a Russian-language site. And, unlike most Russian commentators, almost every American specialist who reacted to the article, directly or indirectly, adamantly disputed my thesis that US-Russian relations had deteriorated so badly they should now be understood as a new cold war--or possibly as a continuation of the old one.

Developments during the last year have amply confirmed that thesis. Several examples could be cited, but two should be enough. The increasingly belligerent charges and counter-charges by officials and in the media on both sides, "Cold-War-style rhetoric and threats," as the Associated Press recently reported, read like a replay of the American-Soviet discourse of the 1970s and early 1980s. And the unfolding conflict over US plans to build missile defense components near post-Soviet Russia, in Poland and the Czech Republic, threatens to reintroduce a dangerous military feature of that cold-war era in Europe.

Nonetheless, most American officials, journalists and academics, unwilling perhaps to confront their unwise policies and mistaken analyses since the Soviet Union ended in 1991, continue to deny the cold-war nature of today's relationship with Russia. A resident expert at the Council on Foreign Relations tells us, for example, that "the situation today is nothing like the Cold War times," while another think-tank specialist, testifying to Congress, can "see no prospect of a new Cold War."

Indeed, many commentators even insist that cold war is no longer possible because today's US-Russian conflicts are not global, ideological or clashes between two different systems; because post-Soviet Russia is too weak to wage such a struggle; and because of the avowed personal "friendship" between Presidents Bush and Putin. They seem unaware that the last cold war began regionally, in Central and Eastern Europe; that present-day antagonisms between Washington's "democracy-promotion" policies and Moscow's self-described "sovereign democracy" have become intensely ideological; that Russia's new, non-Communist system is scarcely like the American one; that Russia is well situated, as I explained in the article, to compete in a new cold war whose front lines run through the former Soviet territories, from Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia; and that there was also, back in the cold-war 1970s, a Nixon-Brezhnev "friendship."

Nor is this merely an academic dispute. Unless US policy-makers and opinion-makers recognize how bad the relationship has become, we risk losing not only the historic opportunity for an American-Russian partnership created in the late 1980s by Gorbachev, Reagan and the first President Bush, and which is even more essential for our real national security today; we also risk a prolonged cold war even more dangerous than was the last one, for reasons spelled out in my article.

Still worse, the overwhelming majority of US officials and opinion-makers who do acknowledge the serious deterioration in relations between Washington and Moscow blame the development solely on Putin's domestic and foreign policies. Not surprisingly, the most heretical part of my article--that the origins of the new cold war are to be found instead in attitudes and policies toward post-Soviet Russia adopted by the Clinton administration back in the 1990s and largely continued by this Bush administration--has found even less support. But unless it too is fully acknowledged, we are left only with the astonishing admission of a leading academic specialist with longstanding ties in Washington. Lamenting the state of US-Russian relations, he informs us, "Nobody has a good idea of what is to be done."

What must be done, however, is clear enough. Because the new cold war began in Washington, steps toward ending it also have to begin in Washington. Two are especially urgent, for reasons also explained in the article: A US recognition that post-Soviet Russia is not a defeated supplicant or American client state, as seems to have been the prevailing view since 1991, but a fully sovereign nation at home with legitimate national interests abroad equal to our own; and an immediate end to the reckless expansion of NATO around Russia's borders.

According to principles of American democracy, the best time to fight for such a change in policy is in the course of campaigns for the presidency. That is why I am pleased my article is reappearing at this time. On the other hand, the hour is late, and it is hard to be optimistic.
— Stephen F. Cohen
June, 8, 2007

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/cohen

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 10:00 PM

The original Thesis:

Contrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America's national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented development that most US policy-makers have recklessly disregarded, as evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-Communist Russia during the past fifteen years.

As a result of the Soviet breakup in 1991, Russia, a state bearing every nuclear and other device of mass destruction, virtually collapsed. During the 1990s its essential infrastructures--political, economic and social--disintegrated. Moscow's hold on its vast territories was weakened by separatism, official corruption and Mafia-like crime. The worst peacetime depression in modern history brought economic losses more than twice those suffered in World War II. GDP plummeted by nearly half and capital investment by 80 percent. Most Russians were thrown into poverty. Death rates soared and the population shrank. And in August 1998, the financial system imploded.

No one in authority anywhere had ever foreseen that one of the twentieth century's two superpowers would plunge, along with its arsenals of destruction, into such catastrophic circumstances. Even today, we cannot be sure what Russia's collapse might mean for the rest of the world.

Outwardly, the nation may now seem to have recovered. Its economy has grown on average by 6 to 7 percent annually since 1999, its stock-market index increased last year by 83 percent and its gold and foreign currency reserves are the world's fifth largest. Moscow is booming with new construction, frenzied consumption of Western luxury goods and fifty-six large casinos. Some of this wealth has trickled down to the provinces and middle and lower classes, whose income has been rising. But these advances, loudly touted by the Russian government and Western investment-fund promoters, are due largely to high world prices for the country's oil and gas and stand out only in comparison with the wasteland of 1998.

More fundamental realities indicate that Russia remains in an unprecedented state of peacetime demodernization and depopulation. Investment in the economy and other basic infrastructures remains barely a third of the 1990 level. Some two-thirds of Russians still live below or very near the poverty line, including 80 percent of families with two or more children, 60 percent of rural citizens and large segments of the educated and professional classes, among them teachers, doctors and military officers. The gap between the poor and the rich, Russian experts tell us, is becoming "explosive."

Most tragic and telling, the nation continues to suffer wartime death and birth rates, its population declining by 700,000 or more every year. Male life expectancy is barely 59 years and, at the other end of the life cycle, 2 to 3 million children are homeless. Old and new diseases, from tuberculosis to HIV infections, have grown into epidemics. Nationalists may exaggerate in charging that "the Motherland is dying," but even the head of Moscow's most pro-Western university warns that Russia remains in "extremely deep crisis."

The stability of the political regime atop this bleak post-Soviet landscape rests heavily, if not entirely, on the personal popularity and authority of one man, President Vladimir Putin, who admits the state "is not yet completely stable." While Putin's ratings are an extraordinary 70 to 75 percent positive, political institutions and would-be leaders below him have almost no public support.

The top business and administrative elites, having rapaciously "privatized" the Soviet state's richest assets in the 1990s, are particularly despised. Indeed, their possession of that property, because it lacks popular legitimacy, remains a time bomb embedded in the political and economic system. The huge military is equally unstable, its ranks torn by a lack of funds, abuses of authority and discontent. No wonder serious analysts worry that one or more sudden developments--a sharp fall in world oil prices, more major episodes of ethnic violence or terrorism, or Putin's disappearance--might plunge Russia into an even worse crisis. Pointing to the disorder spreading from Chechnya through the country's southern rim, for example, the eminent scholar Peter Reddaway even asks "whether Russia is stable enough to hold together."

As long as catastrophic possibilities exist in that nation, so do the unprecedented threats to US and international security. Experts differ as to which danger is the gravest--proliferation of Russia's enormous stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological materials; ill-maintained nuclear reactors on land and on decommissioned submarines; an impaired early-warning system controlling missiles on hair-trigger alert; or the first-ever civil war in a shattered superpower, the terror-ridden Chechen conflict. But no one should doubt that together they constitute a much greater constant threat than any the United States faced during the Soviet era.
Nor is a catastrophe involving weapons of mass destruction the only danger in what remains the world's largest territorial country. Nearly a quarter of the planet's people live on Russia's borders, among them conflicting ethnic and religious groups. Any instability in Russia could easily spread to a crucial and exceedingly volatile part of the world.

There is another, perhaps more likely, possibility. Petrodollars may bring Russia long-term stability, but on the basis of growing authoritarianism and xenophobic nationalism. Those ominous factors derive primarily not from Russia's lost superpower status (or Putin's KGB background), as the US press regularly misinforms readers, but from so many lost and damaged lives at home since 1991. Often called the "Weimar scenario," this outcome probably would not be truly fascist, but it would be a Russia possessing weapons of mass destruction and large proportions of the world's oil and natural gas, even more hostile to the West than was its Soviet predecessor.

How has the US government responded to these unprecedented perils? It doesn't require a degree in international relations or media punditry to understand that the first principle of policy toward post-Communist Russia must follow the Hippocratic injunction: Do no harm! Do nothing to undermine its fragile stability, nothing to dissuade the Kremlin from giving first priority to repairing the nation's crumbling infrastructures, nothing to cause it to rely more heavily on its stockpiles of superpower weapons instead of reducing them, nothing to make Moscow uncooperative with the West in those joint pursuits. Everything else in that savaged country is of far less consequence.

Since the early 1990s Washington has simultaneously conducted, under Democrats and Republicans, two fundamentally different policies toward post-Soviet Russia--one decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative policy, which has been taken at face value in the United States, at least until recently, professes to have replaced America's previous cold war intentions with a generous relationship of "strategic partnership and friendship." The public image of this approach has featured happy-talk meetings between American and Russian presidents, first "Bill and Boris" (Clinton and Yeltsin), then "George and Vladimir."

The real US policy has been very different--a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington's approach to Soviet Communist Russia. Consider its defining elements as they have unfolded--with fulsome support in both American political parties, influential newspapers and policy think tanks--since the early 1990s:

§ A growing military encirclement of Russia, on and near its borders, by US and NATO bases, which are already ensconced or being planned in at least half the fourteen other former Soviet republics, from the Baltics and Ukraine to Georgia, Azerbaijan and the new states of Central Asia. The result is a US-built reverse iron curtain and the remilitarization of American-Russian relations.

§ A tacit (and closely related) US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or contiguous former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. How else to explain, to take a bellwether example, the thinking of Richard Holbrooke, Democratic would-be Secretary of State? While roundly condemning the Kremlin for promoting a pro-Moscow government in neighboring Ukraine, where Russia has centuries of shared linguistic, marital, religious, economic and security ties, Holbrooke declares that far-away Slav nation part of "our core zone of security."

§ Even more, a presumption that Russia does not have full sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992. They have included an on-site crusade by swarms of American "advisers," particularly during the 1990s, to direct Russia's "transition" from Communism; endless missionary sermons from afar, often couched in threats, on how that nation should and should not organize its political and economic systems; and active support for Russian anti-Kremlin groups, some associated with hated Yeltsin-era oligarchs.
That interventionary impulse has now grown even into suggestions that Putin be overthrown by the kind of US-backed "color revolutions" carried out since 2003 in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and attempted this year in Belarus. Thus, while mainstream editorial pages increasingly call the Russian president "thug," "fascist" and "Saddam Hussein," one of the Carnegie Endowment's several Washington crusaders assures us of "Putin's weakness" and vulnerability to "regime change." (Do proponents of "democratic regime change" in Russia care that it might mean destabilizing a nuclear state?)

§ Underpinning these components of the real US policy are familiar cold war double standards condemning Moscow for doing what Washington does--such as seeking allies and military bases in former Soviet republics, using its assets (oil and gas in Russia's case) as aid to friendly governments and regulating foreign money in its political life.

More broadly, when NATO expands to Russia's front and back doorsteps, gobbling up former Soviet-bloc members and republics, it is "fighting terrorism" and "protecting new states"; when Moscow protests, it is engaging in "cold war thinking." When Washington meddles in the politics of Georgia and Ukraine, it is "promoting democracy"; when the Kremlin does so, it is "neoimperialism." And not to forget the historical background: When in the 1990s the US-supported Yeltsin overthrew Russia's elected Parliament and Constitutional Court by force, gave its national wealth and television networks to Kremlin insiders, imposed a constitution without real constraints on executive power and rigged elections, it was "democratic reform"; when Putin continues that process, it is "authoritarianism."

§ Finally, the United States is attempting, by exploiting Russia's weakness, to acquire the nuclear superiority it could not achieve during the Soviet era. That is the essential meaning of two major steps taken by the Bush Administration in 2002, both against Moscow's strong wishes. One was the Administration's unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, freeing it to try to create a system capable of destroying incoming missiles and thereby the capacity to launch a nuclear first strike without fear of retaliation. The other was pressuring the Kremlin to sign an ultimately empty nuclear weapons reduction agreement requiring no actual destruction of weapons and indeed allowing development of new ones; providing for no verification; and permitting unilateral withdrawal before the specified reductions are required.

The extraordinarily anti-Russian nature of these policies casts serious doubt on two American official and media axioms: that the recent "chill" in US-Russian relations has been caused by Putin's behavior at home and abroad, and that the cold war ended fifteen years ago. The first axiom is false, the second only half true: The cold war ended in Moscow, but not in Washington, as is clear from a brief look back.
The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985 with heretical "New Thinking" that proposed not merely to ease but to actually abolish the decades-long cold war. His proposals triggered a fateful struggle in Washington (and Moscow) between policy-makers who wanted to seize the historic opportunity and those who did not. President Ronald Reagan decided to meet Gorbachev at least part of the way, as did his successor, the first President George Bush. As a result, in December 1989, at a historic summit meeting at Malta, Gorbachev and Bush declared the cold war over. (That extraordinary agreement evidently has been forgotten; thus we have the New York Times recently asserting that the US-Russian relationship today "is far better than it was 15 years ago.")

Declarations alone, however, could not terminate decades of warfare attitudes. Even when Bush was agreeing to end the cold war in 1989-91, many of his top advisers, like many members of the US political elite and media, strongly resisted. (I witnessed that rift on the eve of Malta, when I was asked to debate the issue in front of Bush and his divided foreign policy team.) Proof came with the Soviet breakup in December 1991: US officials and the media immediately presented the purported "end of the cold war" not as a mutual Soviet-American decision, which it certainly was, but as a great American victory and Russian defeat.

That (now standard) triumphalist narrative is the primary reason the cold war was quickly revived--not in Moscow a decade later by Putin but in Washington in the early 1990s, when the Clinton Administration made two epically unwise decisions. One was to treat post-Communist Russia as a defeated nation that was expected to replicate America's domestic practices and bow to its foreign policies. It required, behind the facade of the Clinton-Yeltsin "partnership and friendship" (as Clinton's top "Russia hand," Strobe Talbott, later confirmed), telling Yeltsin "here's some more **** for your face" and Moscow's "submissiveness." From that triumphalism grew the still-ongoing interventions in Moscow's internal affairs and the abiding notion that Russia has no autonomous rights at home or abroad.

Clinton's other unwise decision was to break the Bush Administration's promise to Soviet Russia in 1990-91 not to expand NATO "one inch to the east" and instead begin its expansion to Russia's borders. From that profound act of bad faith, followed by others, came the dangerously provocative military encirclement of Russia and growing Russian suspicions of US intentions. Thus, while American journalists and even scholars insist that "the cold war has indeed vanished" and that concerns about a new one are "silly," Russians across the political spectrum now believe that in Washington "the cold war did not end" and, still more, that "the US is imposing a new cold war on Russia."

That ominous view is being greatly exacerbated by Washington's ever-growing "anti-Russian fatwa," as a former Reagan appointee terms it. This year it includes a torrent of official and media statements denouncing Russia's domestic and foreign policies, vowing to bring more of its neighbors into NATO and urging Bush to boycott the G-8 summit to be chaired by Putin in St. Petersburg in July; a call by would-be Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain for "very harsh" measures against Moscow; Congress's pointed refusal to repeal a Soviet-era restriction on trade with Russia; the Pentagon's revival of old rumors that Russian intelligence gave Saddam Hussein information endangering US troops; and comments by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, echoing the regime-changers, urging Russians, "if necessary, to change their government."

For its part, the White House deleted from its 2006 National Security Strategy the long-professed US-Russian partnership, backtracked on agreements to help Moscow join the World Trade Organization and adopted sanctions against Belarus, the Slav former republic most culturally akin to Russia and with whom the Kremlin is negotiating a new union state. Most significant, in May it dispatched Vice President Cheney to an anti-Russian conference in former Soviet Lithuania, now a NATO member, to denounce the Kremlin and make clear it is not "a strategic partner and a trusted friend," thereby ending fifteen years of official pretense.

More astonishing is a Council on Foreign Relations "task force report" on Russia, co-chaired by Democratic presidential aspirant John Edwards, issued in March. The "nonpartisan" council's reputed moderation and balance are nowhere in evidence. An unrelenting exercise in double standards, the report blames all the "disappointments" in US-Russian relations solely on "Russia's wrong direction" under Putin--from meddling in the former Soviet republics and backing Iran to conflicts over NATO, energy politics and the "rollback of Russian democracy."

Strongly implying that Bush has been too soft on Putin, the council report flatly rejects partnership with Moscow as "not a realistic prospect." It calls instead for "selective cooperation" and "selective opposition," depending on which suits US interests, and, in effect, Soviet-era containment. Urging more Western intervention in Moscow's political affairs, the report even reserves for Washington the right to reject Russia's future elections and leaders as "illegitimate." An article in the council's influential journal Foreign Affairs menacingly adds that the United States is quickly "attaining nuclear primacy" and the ability "to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike."

Every consequence of this bipartisan American cold war against post-Communist Russia has exacerbated the dangers inherent in the Soviet breakup mentioned above. The crusade to transform Russia during the 1990s, with its disastrous "shock therapy" economic measures and resulting antidemocratic acts, further destabilized the country, fostering an oligarchical system that plundered the state's wealth, deprived essential infrastructures of investment, impoverished the people and nurtured dangerous corruption. In the process, it discredited Western-style reform, generated mass anti-Americanism where there had been almost none--only 5 percent of Russians surveyed in May thought the United States was a "friend"--and eviscerated the once-influential pro-American faction in Kremlin and electoral politics.

Military encirclement, the Bush Administration's striving for nuclear supremacy and today's renewed US intrusions into Russian politics are having even worse consequences. They have provoked the Kremlin into undertaking its own conventional and nuclear buildup, relying more rather than less on compromised mechanisms of control and maintenance, while continuing to invest miserly sums in the country's decaying economic base and human resources. The same American policies have also caused Moscow to cooperate less rather than more in existing US-funded programs to reduce the multiple risks represented by Russia's materials of mass destruction and to prevent accidental nuclear war. More generally, they have inspired a new Kremlin ideology of "emphasizing our sovereignty" that is increasingly nationalistic, intolerant of foreign-funded NGOs as "fifth columns" and reliant on anti-Western views of the "patriotic" Russian intelligentsia and the Orthodox Church.
Moscow's responses abroad have also been the opposite of what Washington policy-makers should want. Interpreting US-backed "color revolutions" as a quest for military outposts on Russia's borders, the Kremlin now opposes pro-democracy movements in former Soviet republics more than ever, while supporting the most authoritarian regimes in the region, from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Meanwhile, Moscow is forming a political, economic and military "strategic partnership" with China, lending support to Iran and other anti-American governments in the Middle East and already putting surface-to-air missiles back in Belarus, in effect Russia's western border with NATO.

If American policy and Russia's predictable countermeasures continue to develop into a full-scale cold war, several new factors could make it even more dangerous than was its predecessor. Above all, the growing presence of Western bases and US-backed governments in the former Soviet republics has moved the "front lines" of the conflict, in the alarmed words of a Moscow newspaper, from Germany to Russia's "near abroad." As a "hostile ring tightens around the Motherland," in the view of former Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov, many different Russians see a mortal threat. Putin's chief political deputy, Vladislav Surkov, for example, sees the "enemy...at the gates," and the novelist and Soviet-era dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sees the "complete encirclement of Russia and then the loss of its sovereignty." The risks of direct military conflict could therefore be greater than ever. Protesting overflights by NATO aircraft, a Russian general has already warned, "If they violate our borders, they should be shot down."

Worsening the geopolitical factor are radically different American and Russian self-perceptions. By the mid-1960s the US-Soviet cold war relationship had acquired a significant degree of stability because the two superpowers, perceiving a stalemate, began to settle for political and military "parity." Today, however, the United States, the self-proclaimed "only superpower," has a far more expansive view of its international entitlements and possibilities. Moscow, on the other hand, feels weaker and more vulnerable than it did before 1991. And in that asymmetry lies the potential for a less predictable cold war relationship between the two still fully armed nuclear states.

There is also a new psychological factor. Because the unfolding cold war is undeclared, it is already laden with feelings of betrayal and mistrust on both sides. Having welcomed Putin as Yeltsin's chosen successor and offered him its conception of "partnership and friendship," Washington now feels deceived by Putin's policies. According to two characteristic commentaries in the Washington Post, Bush had a "well-intentioned Russian policy," but "a Russian autocrat...betrayed the American's faith." Putin's Kremlin, however, has been reacting largely to a decade of broken US promises and Yeltsin's boozy compliance. Thus Putin's declaration four years ago, paraphrased on Russian radio: "The era of Russian geopolitical concessions coming to an end." (Looking back, he remarked bitterly that Russia has been "constantly deceived.")

Still worse, the emerging cold war lacks the substantive negotiations and cooperation, known as détente, that constrained the previous one. Behind the lingering facade, a well-informed Russian tells us, "dialogue is almost nonexistent." It is especially true in regard to nuclear weapons. The Bush Administration's abandonment of the ABM treaty and real reductions, its decision to build an antimissile shield, and talk of pre-emptive war and nuclear strikes have all but abolished long-established US-Soviet agreements that have kept the nuclear peace for nearly fifty years. Indeed, according to a report, Bush's National Security Council is contemptuous of arms control as "baggage from the cold war." In short, as dangers posed by nuclear weapons have grown and a new arms race unfolds, efforts to curtail or even discuss them have ended.

Finally, anti-cold war forces that once played an important role in the United States no longer exist. Cold war lobbies, old and new ones, therefore operate virtually unopposed, some of them funded by anti-Kremlin Russian oligarchs in exile. At high political levels, the new American cold war has been, and remains, fully bipartisan, from Clinton to Bush, Madeleine Albright to Rice, Edwards to McCain. At lower levels, once robust pro-détente public groups, particularly anti-arms-race movements, have been largely demobilized by official, media and academic myths that "the cold war is over" and we have been "liberated" from nuclear and other dangers in Russia.
Also absent (or silent) are the kinds of American scholars who protested cold war excesses in the past. Meanwhile, a legion of new intellectual cold warriors has emerged, particularly in Washington, media favorites whose crusading anti-Putin zeal goes largely unchallenged. (Typically, one inveterate missionary constantly charges Moscow with "not delivering" on US interests, while another now calls for a surreal crusade, "backed by international donors," to correct young Russians' thinking about Stalin.) There are a few notable exceptions--also bipartisan, from former Reaganites to [I]Nation contributors--but "anathematizing Russia," as Gorbachev recently put it, is so consensual that even an outspoken critic of US policy inexplicably ends an article, "Of course, Russia has been largely to blame."

Making these political factors worse has been the "pluralist" US mainstream media. In the past, opinion page editors and television producers regularly solicited voices to challenge cold war zealots, but today such dissenters, and thus the vigorous public debate of the past, are almost entirely missing. Instead, influential editorial pages are dominated by resurgent cold war orthodoxies, led by the Post, whose incessant demonization of Putin's "autocracy" and "crude neoimperialism" reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac. On the conservative New York Sun's front page, US-Russian relations today are presented as "a duel to the death--perhaps literally."
The Kremlin's strong preference "not to return to the cold war era," as Putin stated May 13 in response to Cheney's inflammatory charges, has been mainly responsible for preventing such fantasies from becoming reality. "Someone is still fighting the cold war," a British academic recently wrote, "but it isn't Russia." A fateful struggle over this issue, however, is now under way in Moscow, with the "pro-Western" Putin resisting demands for a "more hard line" course and, closely related, favoring larger FDR-style investments in the people (and the country's stability). Unless US policy, which is abetting the hard-liners in that struggle, changes fundamentally, the symbiotic axis between American and Russian cold warriors that drove the last conflict will re-emerge. If so, the Kremlin, whether under Putin or a successor, will fight the new one--with all the unprecedented dangers that would entail.

Given different principles and determined leadership, it is still not too late for a new US policy toward post-Soviet Russia. Its components would include full cooperation in securing Moscow's materials of mass destruction; radically reducing nuclear weapons on both sides while banning the development of new ones and taking all warheads off hair-trigger alert; dissuading other states from acquiring those weapons; countering terrorist activities and drug-trafficking near Russia; and augmenting energy supplies to the West.

None of those programs are possible without abandoning the warped priorities and fallacies that have shaped US policy since 1991. National security requires identifying and pursuing essential priorities, but US policy-makers have done neither consistently. The only truly vital American interest in Russia today is preventing its stockpiles of mass destruction from endangering the world, whether through Russia's destabilization or hostility to the West.

All of the dangerous fallacies underlying US policy are expressions of unbridled triumphalism. The decision to treat post-Soviet Russia as a vanquished nation, analogous to postwar Germany and Japan (but without the funding), squandered a historic opportunity for a real partnership and established the bipartisan premise that Moscow's "direction" at home and abroad should be determined by the United States. Applied to a country with Russia's size and long history as a world power, and that had not been militarily defeated, the premise was inherently self-defeating and certain to provoke a resentful backlash.

That folly produced two others. One was the assumption that the United States had the right, wisdom and power to remake post-Communist Russia into a political and economic replica of America. A conceit as vast as its ignorance of Russia's historical traditions and contemporary realities, it led to the counterproductive crusade of the 1990s, which continues in various ways today. The other was the presumption that Russia should be America's junior partner in foreign policy with no interests except those of the United States. By disregarding Russia's history, different geopolitical realities and vital interests, this presumption has also been senseless.

As a Eurasian state with 20-25 million Muslim citizens of its own and with Iran one of its few neighbors not being recruited by NATO, for example, Russia can ill afford to be drawn into Washington's expanding conflict with the Islamic world, whether in Iran or Iraq. Similarly, by demanding that Moscow vacate its traditional political and military positions in former Soviet republics so the United States and NATO can occupy them--and even subsidize Ukraine's defection with cheap gas--Washington is saying that Russia not only has no Monroe Doctrine-like rights in its own neighborhood but no legitimate security rights at all. Not surprisingly, such flagrant double standards have convinced the Kremlin that Washington has become more belligerent since Yeltsin's departure simply "because Russian policy has become more pro-Russian."

Nor was American triumphalism a fleeting reaction to 1991. A decade later, the tragedy of September 11 gave Washington a second chance for a real partnership with Russia. At a meeting on June 16, 2001, President Bush sensed in Putin's "soul" a partner for America. And so it seemed after September 11, when Putin's Kremlin did more than any NATO government to assist the US war effort in Afghanistan, giving it valuable intelligence, a Moscow-trained Afghan combat force and easy access to crucial air bases in former Soviet Central Asia.

The Kremlin understandably believed that in return Washington would give it an equitable relationship. Instead, it got US withdrawal from the ABM treaty, Washington's claim to permanent bases in Central Asia (as well as Georgia) and independent access to Caspian oil and gas, a second round of NATO expansion taking in several former Soviet republics and bloc members, and a still-growing indictment of its domestic and foreign conduct. Astonishingly, not even September 11 was enough to end Washington's winner-take-all principles.

Why have Democratic and Republican administrations believed they could act in such relentlessly anti-Russian ways without endangering US national security? The answer is another fallacy--the belief that Russia, diminished and weakened by its loss of the Soviet Union, had no choice but to bend to America's will. Even apart from the continued presence of Soviet-era weapons in Russia, it was a grave misconception. Because of its extraordinary material and human attributes, Russia, as its intellectuals say, has always been "destined to be a great power." This was still true after 1991.

Even before world energy prices refilled its coffers, the Kremlin had ready alternatives to the humiliating role scripted by Washington. Above all, Russia could forge strategic alliances with eager anti-US and non-NATO governments in the East and elsewhere, becoming an arsenal of conventional weapons and nuclear knowledge for states from China and India to Iran and Venezuela. Moscow has already begun that turning away from the West, and it could move much further in that direction.
Still more, even today's diminished Russia can fight, perhaps win, a cold war on its new front lines across the vast former Soviet territories. It has the advantages of geographic proximity, essential markets, energy pipelines and corporate ownership, along with kinship and language and common experiences. They give Moscow an array of soft and hard power to use, if it chooses, against neighboring governments considering a new patron in faraway Washington.

Economically, the Kremlin could cripple nearly destitute Georgia and Moldova by banning their products and otherwise unemployed migrant workers from Russia and by charging Georgia and Ukraine full "free-market" prices for essential energy. Politically, Moscow could truncate tiny Georgia and Moldova, and big Ukraine, by welcoming their large, pro-Russian territories into the Russian Federation or supporting their demands for independent statehood (as the West has been doing for Kosovo and Montenegro in Serbia). Militarily, Moscow could take further steps toward turning the Shanghai Cooperation Organization--now composed of Russia, China and four Central Asian states, with Iran and India possible members--into an anti-NATO defensive alliance, an "OPEC with nuclear weapons," a Western analyst warned.

That is not all. In the US-Russian struggle in Central Asia over Caspian oil and gas, Washington, as even the triumphalist Thomas Friedman admits, "is at a severe disadvantage." The United States has already lost its military base in Uzbekistan and may soon lose the only remaining one in the region, in Kyrgyzstan; the new pipeline it backed to bypass Russia runs through Georgia, whose stability depends considerably on Moscow; Washington's new friend in oil-rich Azerbaijan is an anachronistic dynastic ruler; and Kazakhstan, whose enormous energy reserves make it a particular US target, has its own large Russian population and is moving back toward Moscow.

Nor is the Kremlin powerless in direct dealings with the West. It can mount more than enough warheads to defeat any missile shield and illusion of "nuclear primacy." It can shut US businesses out of multibillion-dollar deals in Russia and, as it recently reminded the European Union, which gets 25 percent of its gas from Russia, "redirect supplies" to hungry markets in the East. And Moscow could deploy its resources, connections and UN Security Council veto against US interests involving, for instance, nuclear proliferation, Iran, Afghanistan and possibly even Iraq.

Contrary to exaggerated US accusations, the Kremlin has not yet resorted to such retaliatory measures in any significant way. But unless Washington stops abasing and encroaching on Russia, there is no "sovereign" reason why it should not do so. Certainly, nothing Moscow has gotten from Washington since 1992, a Western security specialist emphasizes, "compensates for the geopolitical harm the United States is doing to Russia."

American crusaders insist it is worth the risk in order to democratize Russia and other former Soviet republics. In reality, their campaigns since 1992 have only discredited that cause in Russia. Praising the despised Yeltsin and endorsing other unpopular figures as Russia's "democrats," while denouncing the popular Putin, has associated democracy with the social pain, chaos and humiliation of the 1990s. Ostracizing Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko while embracing tyrants in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan has related it to the thirst for oil. Linking "democratic revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia to NATO membership has equated them with US expansionism. Focusing on the victimization of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkhovsky and not on Russian poverty or ongoing mass protests against social injustices has suggested democracy is only for oligarchs. And by insisting on their indispensable role, US crusaders have all but said (wrongly) that Russians are incapable of democracy or resisting abuses of power on their own.

The result is dark Russian suspicions of American intentions ignored by US policy-makers and media alike. They include the belief that Washington's real purpose is to take control of the country's energy resources and nuclear weapons and use encircling NATO satellite states to "de-sovereignize" Russia, turning it into a "vassal of the West." More generally, US policy has fostered the belief that the American cold war was never really aimed at Soviet Communism but always at Russia, a suspicion given credence by Post and Times columnists who characterize Russia even after Communism as an inherently "autocratic state" with "brutish instincts."

To overcome those towering obstacles to a new relationship, Washington has to abandon the triumphalist conceits primarily responsible for the revived cold war and its growing dangers. It means respecting Russia's sovereign right to determine its course at home (including disposal of its energy resources). As the record plainly shows, interfering in Moscow's internal affairs, whether on-site or from afar, only harms the chances for political liberties and economic prosperity that still exist in that tormented nation.

It also means acknowledging Russia's legitimate security interests, especially in its own "near abroad." In particular, the planned third expansion of NATO, intended to include Ukraine, must not take place. Extending NATO to Russia's doorsteps has already brought relations near the breaking point (without actually benefiting any nation's security); absorbing Ukraine, which Moscow regards as essential to its Slavic identity and its military defense, may be the point of no return, as even pro-US Russians anxiously warn. Nor would it be democratic, since nearly two-thirds of Ukrainians are opposed. The explosive possibilities were adumbrated in late May and early June when local citizens in ethnic Russian Crimea blockaded a port and roads where a US naval ship and contingent of Marines suddenly appeared, provoking resolutions declaring the region "anti-NATO territory" and threats of "a new Vietnam."

Time for a new US policy is running out, but there is no hint of one in official or unofficial circles. Denouncing the Kremlin in May, Cheney spoke "like a triumphant cold warrior," a Times correspondent reported. A top State Department official has already announced the "next great mission" in and around Russia. In the same unreconstructed spirit, Rice has demanded Russians "recognize that we have legitimate interests...in their neighborhood," without a word about Moscow's interests; and a former Clinton official has held the Kremlin "accountable for the ominous security threats...developing between NATO's eastern border and Russia." Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is playing Russian roulette with Moscow's control of its nuclear weapons. Its missile shield project having already provoked a destabilizing Russian buildup, the Administration now proposes to further confuse Moscow's early-warning system, risking an accidental launch, by putting conventional warheads on long-range missiles for the first time.

In a democracy we might expect alternative policy proposals from would-be leaders. But there are none in either party, only demands for a more anti-Russian course, or silence. We should not be surprised. Acquiescence in Bush's monstrous war in Iraq has amply demonstrated the political elite's limited capacity for introspection, independent thought and civic courage. (It prefers to falsely blame the American people, as the managing editor of Foreign Affairs recently did, for craving "ideological red meat.") It may also be intimidated by another revived cold war practice--personal defamation. The Post and The New Yorker have already labeled critics of their Russia policy "Putin apologists" and charged them with "appeasement" and "again taking the Russian side of the Cold War."

The vision and courage of heresy will therefore be needed to escape today's new cold war orthodoxies and dangers, but it is hard to imagine a US politician answering the call. There is, however, a not-too-distant precedent. Twenty years ago, when the world faced exceedingly grave cold war perils, Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged from the orthodox and repressive Soviet political class to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-18-07, 10:43 PM

If you go back to original statements, you were claiming that the Americans intended to shoot down the Airbus, and for what? Civilian casualties? That is the beef here. This is not what happened. You can find no proof to back up this claim either.

This is purely an anti American propaganda with no proof - just black propaganda.

-S

The word "intended" was not used. The word was "decided". Despite an ascending altitude, emitting Mode III squawk, being on the corridor ... etc, the Americans somehow managed to see it as hostile and made the decision to shoot the blip down. You will notice that the Sides seemed to have no problem seeing the situation for what it is either.

SUBMAN1

12-18-07, 11:09 PM

If you go back to original statements, you were claiming that the Americans intended to shoot down the Airbus, and for what? Civilian casualties? That is the beef here. This is not what happened. You can find no proof to back up this claim either.

This is purely an anti American propaganda with no proof - just black propaganda.

-S
The word "intended" was not used. The word was "decided". Despite an ascending altitude, emitting Mode III squawk, being on the corridor ... etc, the Americans somehow managed to see it as hostile and made the decision to shoot the blip down. You will notice that the Sides seemed to have no problem seeing the situation for what it is either.Read again - The same squawk used by an F-14 - hence the confusion. What you had was pure confusion, not a deliberate act to down an airliner. That is a sick thought you have.

-S

Kazuaki Shimazaki II

12-19-07, 03:27 AM

Read again - The same squawk used by an F-14 - hence the confusion. What you had was pure confusion, not a deliberate act to down an airliner. That is a sick thought you have. -S
Apparently, the idiots somehow managed to misplace their range gates. At their rate of competence, they might have placed the gates on one of their OWN aircraft and gotten a "Mode II" which they will then abscribe to the airliner...

How does Mode II->Military Aircraft go several further stages into ->Iranian->Hostile->F-14->F-14 that's armed for antiship attack->and is due to attack USS Vincennes->Deserves pre-emptive death?

Further, according to the 2nd Endorsement:

b. (U) At least one (possibly two) interrogation from the Remote Control Indicator registered a Mode II 1100 IFF squawk. This probably inspired the F-14 classification since the ship had intelligence that Iranian F-14’s were employing Mode II code 1100. The Air Bus, however, was not squawking Mode II. When initially interrogating the target on the RCI, the IDS laid the IFF range gate on the Bandar Abbas area. Given the ducting that day, there is a possibility that the system detected the Mode II squawk of another aircraft. Because the range gate does not move with {p.5} {p.5-1988} the hooked target automatically, in order to continue interrogating Flight 655 the range gate had to be changed manually to track with the contact.

(U) Was it a critical error? No. Even if the Commanding Officer had been informed that there was no Mode II indication, that information alone has little significance. An attacker could easily be either squawking Mode III or no mode if believes it will camouflage his identity. On 18 April, Iranian F-4s that were threatening U.S. units did not squawk any mode throughout that day. Combined with other pieces of information, a Mode II indication may help a Commanding Officer confirm or disaffirm a conclusion, but when under threat it is not definitive but only one piece in the puzzle.
Sorry, but such a statement deserves only the largest size text.