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5 RUSSIA AND THE NEW COLD
WAR When cowboys don't shoot
straight By F William Engdahl
The frank words of Vladimir Putin to the
assembled participants of the annual Munich
security conference have unleashed a storm of
self-righteous protest from Western media and
politicians. A visitor from another planet might
have the impression that the Russian president had
abruptly decided to launch a provocative
confrontation policy with the West reminiscent of
the 1943-91 Cold War.
However, the details
of the developments in the military policies of
the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the
United States since 1991 are anything but deja vu.
This time around we are already deep in a new cold
war whose stakes are literally the future of life
on this planet.
The debacle in Iraq or the
prospect of a US tactical nuclear preemptive
strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In
comparison with what is at play in the US global
military buildup against its most formidable
remaining global rival, Russia, they loom
relatively small. The US military policies since
the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the
Russian Federation in 1991 are in need of close
examination in this context. Only then do Putin's
frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich
Conference on Security make sense.
There
were many misleading accounts of most of Putin's
remarks in Western media. Putin spoke in general
terms of Washington's vision of a "unipolar"
world, with "one center of authority, one center
of force, one center of decision-making", calling
it a "world in which there is one master, one
sovereign. And at the end of the day this is
pernicious not only for all those within this
system, but also for the sovereign itself, because
it destroys itself from within." Then the
president got to the heart of the matter: "Today
we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use
of force - military force - in international
relations, force that is plunging the world into
an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result, we
do not have sufficient strength to find a
comprehensive solution to any one of these
conflicts. Finding a political settlement also
becomes impossible."
Putin continued: "We
are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the
basic principles of international law. And
independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact,
coming increasingly closer to one state's legal
system. One state and, of course, first and
foremost the United States, has overstepped its
national borders in every way. This is visible in
the economic, political, cultural and educational
policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who
likes this? Who is happy about this?"
These direct words began to touch on what
Putin was concerned about in US foreign and
military policy since the end of the Cold War some
16 ago. But it was further in the text that he got
explicit about what military policies he was
reacting to. Here is where the speech is worth
clarification.
Putin warned of the
destabilizing effect of space weapons: "It is
impossible to sanction the appearance of new,
destabilizing high-tech weapons ... a new area of
confrontation, especially in outer space. Star
wars is no longer a fantasy - it is a reality ...
In Russia's opinion, the militarization of outer
space could have unpredictable consequences for
the international community, and provoke nothing
less than the beginning of a nuclear [arms race]
era."
He then declared: "Plans to expand
certain elements of the anti-missile defense
system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who
needs the next step of what would be, in this
case, an inevitable arms race?"
What does
he refer to here? Few are aware that while
claiming it is doing so to protect itself against
the risk of a "rogue state" nuclear-missile attack
from the likes of North Korea or perhaps one day
Iran, the US recently announced it is building
massive anti-missile defense installations in
Poland and the Czech Republic.
Poland?
Missile defense? What's this all about?
Missile defense and a US nuclear first
strike On January 29, US Army
Brigadier-General Patrick J O'Reilly, deputy
director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency,
announced US plans to deploy
anti-ballistic-missile defense elements in Europe
by 2011, which the Pentagon claims is aimed at
protecting US and NATO installations from enemy
threats coming from the Middle East, not Russia.
After Putin's Munich remarks, the US State
Department issued a formal comment noting that the
administration was "puzzled by the repeated
caustic comments about the envisaged system from
Moscow".
Oops ... Better send that press
release back to the Pentagon's Office of Deception
Propaganda for a rewrite. The Iran missile threat
to NATO installations in Poland somehow isn't
quite convincing. Why not ask longtime NATO member
Turkey if the US can place its missile shield
there, far closer to Iran? Or maybe Kuwait? Or
Israel?
US policy since 1999 has called
for building some form of active missile defense
despite the end of the Cold War threat from Soviet
intercontinental ballistic missiles or other
missile launch. The National Missile Defense Act
of 1999 says: "It is the policy of the United
States to deploy as soon as is technologically
possible an effective national missile defense
system capable of defending the territory of the
United States against limited ballistic missile
attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or
deliberate) with funding subject to the annual
authorization of appropriations and the annual
appropriation of funds for national missile
defense." Missile defense was one of Donald
Rumsfeld's obsessions as defense secretary.
Why now? What is increasingly
clear, at least in Moscow and Beijing, is that
Washington has a far larger grand strategy behind
its seemingly irrational and arbitrary unilateral
military moves.
For the Pentagon and the
US policy establishment, regardless of political
party, the Cold War with Russia never ended. It
merely continued in disguised form. This has been
the case with presidents George H W Bush, Bill
Clinton, and now George W Bush.
Missile
defense sounds plausible if the United States is
vulnerable to attack by a tiny band of dedicated
Islamic terrorists able to commandeer a Boeing
aircraft with box cutters. The only problem is
that missile defense is not aimed at rogue
terrorists like al-Qaeda, or states like North
Korea or Iran.
From them the threat of a
devastating nuclear strike on the territory of the
United States is non-existent. The US Navy and Air
Force bomber fleet today stands in full
preparation to bomb, even nuke, Iran back to the
Stone Age only over suspicions it is trying to
develop independent nuclear-weapon technology.
States like Iran have no capability to render the
US defenseless, without risking nuclear
annihilation many times over.
Missile
defense came out of the 1980s when president
Ronald Reagan proposed developing a system of
satellites in space and radar bases around the
globe, listening stations and interceptor
missiles, to monitor and shoot down nuclear
missiles before they hit their intended target.
It was dubbed "Star Wars" by its critics,
but the Pentagon officially has spent more than
US$130 billion on such a system since 1983.
President Bush increased that significantly
beginning 2002, to $11 billion a year, double the
level during the Clinton years. And another $53
billion for the following five years has been
budgeted.
Washington's obsession with
nuclear primacy What Washington did not
say, but Putin has now alluded to in Munich, is
that the US missile defense is not at all
defensive. It is offensive, and how.
The
possibility of providing a powerful state, one
with the world's
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