"One does not choose sites for missile defense out of the blue," Secretary of State Rice said this week in an interview. "It's geometry and geography as to how you intercept a missile."
It's precisely that 'geometry and geography' which compelled Russia's Putin to respond this week to the U.S. "filling Eastern Europe with new weapons," and to resort to tests of his country's new cruise missile and a new ballistic missile which is supposed to be capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads.
"If the U.S. nuclear potential extends across the European territory and threatens Russia, we will be obliged to take countermeasures,'' Putin told reporters last week. "Of course, we'll have to select new targets in Europe,'' he said.
Cheney visited Kazakhstan last spring to coerce them into bypassing Russia with their oil pipeline and supply the West directly through Turkey. He did this right after trashing the Putin government at a conference in Lithuania, right in the midst of U.S. efforts to punish one of Russia's major oil partners, Iran, for 'unanswered questions' about its nuclear program.
It's not clear what Cheney got from Kazakhstan, but it was reported that the former Soviet republic had begun to supply China through its pipeline which links the two countries. China, the world's number two oil consumer next to the U.S., is poised to receive 20 million metric tons of oil a year.
The most revealing argument that the Bush administration has made against Iran is their reference to Iran's oil and the influence Iran gains by trading with regional actors like Russia, Pakistan and China. U.S. Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in a Feb. 2006 Senate Intelligence committee hearing, that a combination of rising demand for energy and instability in oil-producing regions is increasing the geopolitical leverage of key producing states.
"Record oil revenues and diversification of its trading partners are further strengthening the Tehran government." Negroponte warned.
Does this administration want a new cold war? They're angling for one. These brainless, unschooled megalomaniacs see a short term plus in their agenda to isolate Iran and those who would dare to trade with them. Putin threatened to withdraw from two arms control treaties if the U.S. goes ahead with it's planned deployment of missiles to Poland and radar to the Czech Republic. The Russian military has, predictably, responded to the Bush regime's militarism by threatening to train their country's missiles on Poland. Gen Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, also warned that the Russia would pull out of a Cold War treaty restricting production of intermediate range missiles.
Putin responded earlier this year to the Bush regime's militarism with a 'Strangelove' type boast that "Russia . . . has tested missile systems that no one in the world has." ITAR-Tass, Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies quoted Putin as saying that, "These missile systems don't represent a response to a missile defense system, but they are immune to that. They are hypersonic and capable of changing their flight path."
Now it appears that Putin is intent on moving forward with his threat to escalate Russia's defenses in response to the threat he perceives from the U.S. if Bush and his cabal just brush off his latest offer to use and develop the radar site at Gabala, Azerbaijan to track missiles coming from the 'southern side.' Bush has, of course, played down the offer, instead, vowing to push forward with his plans despite whatever counter-response comes from Russia.
Cheney and the rest of the Bush regime are unleashing new, unnecessary fears between the nations of the world as they dissolve decades of firm understandings about an America power which was to be guileless in its unassailable defenses. The falseness of our diplomacy is revealed in their scramble for 'usable', tactical nuclear missiles, new weapons systems, and new justifications for their use.
The Bush regime wants other nations to respond to their strident advance across sovereign borders like adolescents to their paternalistic imperialism. Nations of the world should reject their coercive protection scheme and reject these missile 'umbrellas' which will do little to shield against the administration's stoking of their new "ideological" Cold War they're intent on provoking with their continued militarism.
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