My thoughts on the so-called missile defense shield...
1) The American missile defense shield is in fact an offensive shield:
By the late 1990s the Russian military was so degraded that it was nearing a dangerous point where a sudden first strike by NATO forces could disable it's nuclear deterrence. In theory, a missile shield positioned around the territory of the Russian Federation would stop the launching of any ICBMs that survived the initial strike. Thus, according to some military analysts in the West, there was a window of opportunity, a time when Russia was vulnerable to a first strike. This is how the plan to encircle Russia with anti-missile systems came into being after the fall of the Soviet Union. With Putin's rise to power, however, this window of opportunity began to shrink quite fast. But it's not fully closed yet. A significant threat to Russia still remains today and this threat is the main reason why Moscow has been for the past two years placing all its emphasis on restrengthening its nuclear deterrence.
2) The greatest long term threat to the West is not China - it's a free and independent Russia:
Most Americans have difficulty understanding this. Americans tend think that China is the gravest long term threat to American/western power without realizing that China and the West are financially codependents, they are interlocked in a economic union that neither side will jeopardize. The political establishment here in the US, however, knows full well that the only free, competitive, self-sufficient nation-state with vast natural and monetary reserves coupled with a massive nuclear arsenal is the Russian Federation. The national interests of Russia directly interferes with the global interests of the West. A truly free Russia is the number one obstacle to the West's total global hegemony.
Communism or Bolshevism, per se, was never the real problem between the East and the West just as Islamic fundamentalism or terrorism in general is not the real problem of the western world today. The real problem has always been, is and will always be - who controls the world's wealth and who sets the world's economic and political standards. Because Russia controls something like 10-20% of all natural resources on earth and can directly impact all of Eurasia, a truly free and independent Russia is considered to be the one and only long term threat/competitor that the West faces. Thus, even if Russia miraculously transformed itself into a true democracy overnight it would still be considered an enemy by the West; more precisely, as long as Russia's national interests interferes with the global agenda of the West...
Once one beings to look at global politics beyond mainstream news reports, catchy phrases and personal sentiments, all that is occurring in the world today would begin to make greater sense.
Arevordi
1) The American missile defense shield is in fact an offensive shield:
By the late 1990s the Russian military was so degraded that it was nearing a dangerous point where a sudden first strike by NATO forces could disable it's nuclear deterrence. In theory, a missile shield positioned around the territory of the Russian Federation would stop the launching of any ICBMs that survived the initial strike. Thus, according to some military analysts in the West, there was a window of opportunity, a time when Russia was vulnerable to a first strike. This is how the plan to encircle Russia with anti-missile systems came into being after the fall of the Soviet Union. With Putin's rise to power, however, this window of opportunity began to shrink quite fast. But it's not fully closed yet. A significant threat to Russia still remains today and this threat is the main reason why Moscow has been for the past two years placing all its emphasis on restrengthening its nuclear deterrence.
2) The greatest long term threat to the West is not China - it's a free and independent Russia:
Most Americans have difficulty understanding this. Americans tend think that China is the gravest long term threat to American/western power without realizing that China and the West are financially codependents, they are interlocked in a economic union that neither side will jeopardize. The political establishment here in the US, however, knows full well that the only free, competitive, self-sufficient nation-state with vast natural and monetary reserves coupled with a massive nuclear arsenal is the Russian Federation. The national interests of Russia directly interferes with the global interests of the West. A truly free Russia is the number one obstacle to the West's total global hegemony.
Communism or Bolshevism, per se, was never the real problem between the East and the West just as Islamic fundamentalism or terrorism in general is not the real problem of the western world today. The real problem has always been, is and will always be - who controls the world's wealth and who sets the world's economic and political standards. Because Russia controls something like 10-20% of all natural resources on earth and can directly impact all of Eurasia, a truly free and independent Russia is considered to be the one and only long term threat/competitor that the West faces. Thus, even if Russia miraculously transformed itself into a true democracy overnight it would still be considered an enemy by the West; more precisely, as long as Russia's national interests interferes with the global agenda of the West...
Once one beings to look at global politics beyond mainstream news reports, catchy phrases and personal sentiments, all that is occurring in the world today would begin to make greater sense.
Arevordi
***
NATO Scuttles US Plan to Encircle Russia
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ministers in Brussels have decided to ignore the wishes of the United States and delay the admission of Georgia and the Ukraine, in effect indefinitely, in what the George W Bush administration is sheepishly trying to claim is a positive "compromise". The decision, follows the alarm which peaked among European Union member states last August over the prospect of having to go to war with Russia over an erratic leader in the Caucasus who had provoked Moscow into a reaction. The Germans have a far too deep and painful collective memory of the last war with Russia to be willing to treat the prospect as lightly as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Washington has. The decision deepens growing fault lines across the Atlantic, and next year will be clearly more turbulent even than 2008 in terms of global geopolitics.
The Brussels decision is even more remarkable if taken as indication of Washington's diminishing power over European NATO members. The NATO Foreign Ministers meeting on December 3 issued what to the naive observer might appear a masterpiece of diplomacy. They unanimously agreed to sidestep the usual Membership Action Plan vote for Georgia and Ukraine, the first concrete step towards full membership of NATO. Instead, NATO will expand the activities of two existing bodies - the NATO-Georgia Commission and the NATO-Ukraine Commission - basically to oversee the same reforms as would have been contained in the action plan. NATO ministers also agreed in their communique to renew ties with Russia "in a conditional and graduated manner". Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact that president-elect Obama retained Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who has strongly supported bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision.
The real reasons
The real reason for the refusal is the growing realization within European officialdom that it was Georgia's unpredictable President Mikhail Saakashvili, not Moscow, who first sent Georgian troops into the breakaway province of South Ossetia, after getting a go-ahead from Washington. On November 28, during Georgian official Parliamentary Commission testimony on the background to the August events, Saakashvili made the surprising announcement that he had indeed initiated the war. According to Saakashvili, the attack on the South Ossetian capital, which involved night shelling of residential areas with multiple rocket launcher systems, was aimed at protecting Georgian citizens. He said it was a response to Russia's "intervention" in the region. "We did start military action to take control of Tskhinvali and other unruly areas. But we took this difficult decision to fend off our territory from intervention and save the people who were dying. It was inevitable," Saakashvili said.
The Georgian president claims Russia moved tanks into South Ossetian territory before Georgia launched its attack. He said: "The issue is not about why Georgia started military action - we admit we started it. The issue is about whether there was another chance when our citizens were being killed? We tried to prevent the intervention and fought on our own territory." Saakashvili's surprising admission came only hours after the testimony of Georgia's former ambassador to Moscow, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who had testified for three hours before he was shouted down by pro-Saakashvili members of parliament. A former confidant of Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.
He refused to name the officials who told him about planned actions in Abkhazia, as identifying them would endanger their lives. The official US line has been that they had "warned" Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed. Kitsmarishvili's testimony in front of the parliamentary commission was shown live on Georgian television. The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for "professional negligence". Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who was called on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili's testimony, called the allegations an "irresponsible and shameless fabrication", adding they were "either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics". Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president. Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor last week. "They don't want to listen to the truth," he told reporters. Two days later, Saakashvili proved Kitsmarishvili right.
Full spectrum dominance
As I detail at some length in my book, due out in January 2009, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, the strategy of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is part of a far larger and more dangerous strategic long-term plan of Washington to ultimately encircle, confront and dismember Russia as a functioning state. Russia, even more than China, is the most formidable obstacle to a Washington-centered sole superpower, Pax Americana. Russia's understandable refusal to abandon its nuclear strike force in the face of US violations of agreements made in 1989 between the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev and then US secretary of state James Baker III, namely that NATO would not expand east to the former states of the Warsaw Pact or USSR, presents a dilemma for any plans for sole US superpower domination. The Bush presidency was a raw attempt to remedy this by brute military force. The militarization of Iraq and the Middle East oil fields was but one step. The creation of a US 'missile shield' in Poland and the Czech Republic, was another, major step.
The misnamed "missile defense shield" would in reality be an offensive capability that when installed by perhaps 2012, will put the world, especially Western Europe on a hair-trigger to nuclear war. When combined with the entry of Russian border states Georgia and Ukraine to NATO this would simply present Moscow with de facto defeat. This is not about Russia returning to old Soviet-style rule under Putin or Medvedev. It's about the ultimate survival of Russia as a nation, as Moscow rightly sees it, not about the finer points of democracy. No one in either Berlin, Paris, London nor Brussels, and certainly not in Washington, is ignorant of that reality. European NATO members are increasingly nervous about the prospect of a military confrontation with Russia. Last August's swift Russian response to act in aid of South Ossetians against the Georgian invasion sent a reality shock through Europe. Neither Germany nor France wish to admit unstable states like Georgia or Ukraine only to be forced to act militarily in their defense in event of a repeat of the madness of last August. That, simply stated, is the real, unspoken reason that Washington on December 3 in Brussels was forced to accept a face-saving compromise. The NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine to all intent and purposes is dead. As one NATO military official stated, "NATO has lost the glue that once held it together." The statement of Rice following the NATO meeting was telling. She was forced to tell press, "... there is a long road ahead for both Georgia and Ukraine to reach those standards. The United States stands resolutely for those standards, meaning that there should be no shortcuts to membership of NATO." Rice added.
Polish motorcade shoot was 'Georgia stunt'
Further adding to the atmosphere of almost Laurel and Hardy comic farce surrounding Georgia's erratic president - who was filmed shortly after the Russian invasion in August by BBC actually swallowing and chewing on his tie - it has now emerged that an alleged shooting incident a week before the Brussels NATO meeting, which involved the motorcade of the Georgian and Polish presidents, was a staged "stunt". Special services in Warsaw say the alleged attack near the South Ossetian border was a provocation staged by the Georgians. A report by Poland's Internal Security Agency - the Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego (ABW), published by the Dziennik newspaper, claims Georgia staged the incident for propaganda purposes. The incident took place on Sunday evening when Saakashvili was showing his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski the area near the border with South Ossetia. After the convoy stopped at a checkpoint, there was gunfire, which the Georgians claimed was an "attack by Russian troops".
Lech Kaczynski's personal security chief, Colonel Krzysztof Olszowiec, was accused of failing to ensure proper security for the president during his trip to Georgia and dismissed despite objections from Kaczynski, according to the Polish media. The trip to the border area with Russian-backed South Ossetia was the result of a last-minute invitation from Saakashvili, according to Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Piotr Paskowski. Initially, Warsaw blamed Russia for the incident. But now Polish security forces say it was staged by Tbilisi. Russia had strongly denied the allegations, saying Tbilisi was behind it. President Kaczynski confirmed that shooting had taken place but stopped short of blaming anyone. Russia's position has now been supported by Poland's ABW, who said "the shots fired near the cars of Georgian and Polish president were a Georgian provocation". The Polish document points out that Saakashvili kept on smiling after the first shots and his bodyguards didn't react. The report also highlights another suspicious fact, namely, that the bus carrying journalists was instructed to travel in front of the motorcade, while the car with Kaczynski's own bodyguards was pushed back by Georgian soldiers. The result was that they were not in a position to witness the alleged shooting. All-in-all, it might be Saakashvili's tenure as president that faces major internal challeges over his bent for undertaking such reckless stunts.
F William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics (Pluto Press), and the book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). His new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out late January 2009. He may be reached through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
The Brussels decision is even more remarkable if taken as indication of Washington's diminishing power over European NATO members. The NATO Foreign Ministers meeting on December 3 issued what to the naive observer might appear a masterpiece of diplomacy. They unanimously agreed to sidestep the usual Membership Action Plan vote for Georgia and Ukraine, the first concrete step towards full membership of NATO. Instead, NATO will expand the activities of two existing bodies - the NATO-Georgia Commission and the NATO-Ukraine Commission - basically to oversee the same reforms as would have been contained in the action plan. NATO ministers also agreed in their communique to renew ties with Russia "in a conditional and graduated manner". Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact that president-elect Obama retained Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who has strongly supported bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision.
The real reasons
The real reason for the refusal is the growing realization within European officialdom that it was Georgia's unpredictable President Mikhail Saakashvili, not Moscow, who first sent Georgian troops into the breakaway province of South Ossetia, after getting a go-ahead from Washington. On November 28, during Georgian official Parliamentary Commission testimony on the background to the August events, Saakashvili made the surprising announcement that he had indeed initiated the war. According to Saakashvili, the attack on the South Ossetian capital, which involved night shelling of residential areas with multiple rocket launcher systems, was aimed at protecting Georgian citizens. He said it was a response to Russia's "intervention" in the region. "We did start military action to take control of Tskhinvali and other unruly areas. But we took this difficult decision to fend off our territory from intervention and save the people who were dying. It was inevitable," Saakashvili said.
The Georgian president claims Russia moved tanks into South Ossetian territory before Georgia launched its attack. He said: "The issue is not about why Georgia started military action - we admit we started it. The issue is about whether there was another chance when our citizens were being killed? We tried to prevent the intervention and fought on our own territory." Saakashvili's surprising admission came only hours after the testimony of Georgia's former ambassador to Moscow, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who had testified for three hours before he was shouted down by pro-Saakashvili members of parliament. A former confidant of Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.
He refused to name the officials who told him about planned actions in Abkhazia, as identifying them would endanger their lives. The official US line has been that they had "warned" Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed. Kitsmarishvili's testimony in front of the parliamentary commission was shown live on Georgian television. The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for "professional negligence". Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who was called on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili's testimony, called the allegations an "irresponsible and shameless fabrication", adding they were "either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics". Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president. Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor last week. "They don't want to listen to the truth," he told reporters. Two days later, Saakashvili proved Kitsmarishvili right.
Full spectrum dominance
As I detail at some length in my book, due out in January 2009, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, the strategy of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is part of a far larger and more dangerous strategic long-term plan of Washington to ultimately encircle, confront and dismember Russia as a functioning state. Russia, even more than China, is the most formidable obstacle to a Washington-centered sole superpower, Pax Americana. Russia's understandable refusal to abandon its nuclear strike force in the face of US violations of agreements made in 1989 between the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev and then US secretary of state James Baker III, namely that NATO would not expand east to the former states of the Warsaw Pact or USSR, presents a dilemma for any plans for sole US superpower domination. The Bush presidency was a raw attempt to remedy this by brute military force. The militarization of Iraq and the Middle East oil fields was but one step. The creation of a US 'missile shield' in Poland and the Czech Republic, was another, major step.
The misnamed "missile defense shield" would in reality be an offensive capability that when installed by perhaps 2012, will put the world, especially Western Europe on a hair-trigger to nuclear war. When combined with the entry of Russian border states Georgia and Ukraine to NATO this would simply present Moscow with de facto defeat. This is not about Russia returning to old Soviet-style rule under Putin or Medvedev. It's about the ultimate survival of Russia as a nation, as Moscow rightly sees it, not about the finer points of democracy. No one in either Berlin, Paris, London nor Brussels, and certainly not in Washington, is ignorant of that reality. European NATO members are increasingly nervous about the prospect of a military confrontation with Russia. Last August's swift Russian response to act in aid of South Ossetians against the Georgian invasion sent a reality shock through Europe. Neither Germany nor France wish to admit unstable states like Georgia or Ukraine only to be forced to act militarily in their defense in event of a repeat of the madness of last August. That, simply stated, is the real, unspoken reason that Washington on December 3 in Brussels was forced to accept a face-saving compromise. The NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine to all intent and purposes is dead. As one NATO military official stated, "NATO has lost the glue that once held it together." The statement of Rice following the NATO meeting was telling. She was forced to tell press, "... there is a long road ahead for both Georgia and Ukraine to reach those standards. The United States stands resolutely for those standards, meaning that there should be no shortcuts to membership of NATO." Rice added.
Polish motorcade shoot was 'Georgia stunt'
Further adding to the atmosphere of almost Laurel and Hardy comic farce surrounding Georgia's erratic president - who was filmed shortly after the Russian invasion in August by BBC actually swallowing and chewing on his tie - it has now emerged that an alleged shooting incident a week before the Brussels NATO meeting, which involved the motorcade of the Georgian and Polish presidents, was a staged "stunt". Special services in Warsaw say the alleged attack near the South Ossetian border was a provocation staged by the Georgians. A report by Poland's Internal Security Agency - the Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego (ABW), published by the Dziennik newspaper, claims Georgia staged the incident for propaganda purposes. The incident took place on Sunday evening when Saakashvili was showing his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski the area near the border with South Ossetia. After the convoy stopped at a checkpoint, there was gunfire, which the Georgians claimed was an "attack by Russian troops".
Lech Kaczynski's personal security chief, Colonel Krzysztof Olszowiec, was accused of failing to ensure proper security for the president during his trip to Georgia and dismissed despite objections from Kaczynski, according to the Polish media. The trip to the border area with Russian-backed South Ossetia was the result of a last-minute invitation from Saakashvili, according to Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Piotr Paskowski. Initially, Warsaw blamed Russia for the incident. But now Polish security forces say it was staged by Tbilisi. Russia had strongly denied the allegations, saying Tbilisi was behind it. President Kaczynski confirmed that shooting had taken place but stopped short of blaming anyone. Russia's position has now been supported by Poland's ABW, who said "the shots fired near the cars of Georgian and Polish president were a Georgian provocation". The Polish document points out that Saakashvili kept on smiling after the first shots and his bodyguards didn't react. The report also highlights another suspicious fact, namely, that the bus carrying journalists was instructed to travel in front of the motorcade, while the car with Kaczynski's own bodyguards was pushed back by Georgian soldiers. The result was that they were not in a position to witness the alleged shooting. All-in-all, it might be Saakashvili's tenure as president that faces major internal challeges over his bent for undertaking such reckless stunts.
F William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics (Pluto Press), and the book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). His new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out late January 2009. He may be reached through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JL09Ag01.html
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US Conducts Successful Missile Defence Test
The US has successfully conducted a test of its missile defence systems. A spokesman for the US military said a missile launched from Kodiak island in the northern most-state of Alaska was destroyed by an interceptor launched from California, on the country's lower west coast. The Pentagon said 12 tests had been carried out on the system since 1999 out of which seven had been successful. Relations between the US and Russia have been strained by the US' plans to place a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, former parts of the Soviet Union. Russia fears that the systems placed in its neighbouring countries could be used to target it in the future, while the US maintains that they are to counter the threat posed by rogue states and do not have Russia in mind. Russia has threatened to place missile systems pointing at its neighbours in Kaliningrad in response to the US plans.
Source: http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/worl...e-defence-test
Was US Anti-Missile Test Aimed at Russia and China?
A consultant to the head of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces has said that a simulated anti-missile test by the U.S. was not aimed at stopping a North Korean threat as Washington had claimed. Colonel-general Viktor Yesin said last Friday’s test had China and Russia in mind. He said: “To avoid agitating public opinion, U.S. Missile Defense Agency officials say the test was aimed at intercepting North Korean and Iranian rockets. But we missile specialists understand that it was in fact aimed at stopping Russian and Chinese intercontinental missiles.” During the test last Friday an interceptor rocket was launched from California to knock down a missile launched from Alaska. America spends some $US 10 billion a year on an anti-missile network claiming it's necessary to counteract growing threats from ‘rogue nations’ such as North Korea and Iran.
Source: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/34443
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I have come to see the Russian nation as the last front on earth against the scourges of Westernization, Americanization, Globalism, Zionism, Islamic extremism and pan-Turkism. I have also come to see Russia as the last hope humanity has for the preservation of classical western/European civilization, ethnic cultures, Apostolic Christianity and the concept of traditional nation-state. Needless to say, an alliance with Russia is Armenia's only hope for survival in a dangerous place like the south Caucasus. These sobering realizations compelled me to create this blog in 2010. This blog quickly became one of the very few voices in the vastness of Cyberia that dared to preach about the dangers of Globalism and the Anglo-American-Jewish alliance, and the only voice emphasizing the crucial importance of Armenia's close ties to the Russian nation. Today, no man and no political party is capable of driving a wedge between Armenia and Russia. Anglo-American-Jewish and Turkish agenda in Armenia will not succeed. I feel satisfied knowing that at least on a subatomic level I have had a hand in this outcome.
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