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Today, at the bottom of web news pages and buried behind newspaper reviews of the political theater attendant to the appointment of judges to the U.S. Supreme Court, the story of a farmer in Lithia Springs, Georgia (USA) who won a million dollars on a ticket he bought with his change at a gas station, and the fashion details of those adorable tykes currently occupying our White House, is this...ah...news:
"A U.S. warship anchored off the Black Sea coast of Georgia in preparation for joint naval maneuvers with the ex-Soviet nation, which was trounced in a war with Russia last August. Russian warplanes, meanwhile, conducted mock bombing runs in exercises just a few hundred kilometers northwest."Two vessels of the Georgian Coast Guard are to participate alongside the USS Stout in ... exercises (that) would involve averting a sinking after a hull breach, capturing a hostile boat, and joint maneuvers in conflict situations."
One may be tempted to suggest that none but an alarmist would be alarmed by this back page item about one of our many destroyers doing a bit of practice with those other Georgians, little nation that those folks have, small player that it is, part of the old U.S.S.R., but that's history, the birthplace of Josef Stalin, also history, and that Georgia's recent contre temps with Russian tanks is behind us.
Yes, one may be so tempted if one has forgotten "Remember the Maine," the Lusitania, the Gulf of Tonkin "incident," and the historical susceptibility for events associated with ships too often, for reasons actual or contrived, to be the spark that ignites the passions for war.
If you are not yet alarmed, how would you view a situation of a Russian destroyer participating with Canadians in a naval exercise on Lake Eire, with armed NORAD interceptors zooming back and forth over Cleveland?
And what if that U.S. destroyer should run upon an uncharted rock in the Black Sea, or perhaps a derelict mine from WWII: what would the reaction be of the Russians and the Georgians, and how would the self-styled chess masters (actually madmen) in Washington react to such an unplanned event?
Or suppose that mine had been planted for the event, by any of the three parties, whichever one believing to achieve some advantage thereby, or excuse for further mischief, and suppose that entire scenario went out of control and suppose that, as was the case in the Gulf of Tonkin "incident," 60,000 Americans and millions of other lives were forfeit without resolution of anything, a la Vietnam. Would that eventuality be alarming?
What we must immediately do is to carefully watch this particular ship and react most cautiously with utmost prudence and profound suspicion upon any event associated with its mission.
What we must ultimately but urgently soon do is to deny the madmen on our payroll their chess games of nuclear potentiality.
