A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
Evidently not content with turning the entire Middle East into a crisis zone, President Bush seems intent on provoking a second round of the Cold War before he leaves office. It's gotten so bad that an increasingly Stalinistic Vladimir Putin has started accusing us of provoking an "arms race" [1] and conducting "imperialism" in global affairs.
In response to Bush's insistence on creating a missile defense shield, Russia has begun testing "a new ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads." Yep, that means a single Russian attack will have multiple times the destructiveness after our defenses fail to work and all the warheads get through.
It's not just war with the Russians themselves we have to worry about: Russia has ties to many groups and nations we aren't too friendly with. For example, they made a nuclear deal with Iran in 2005 [2] and may have leaked our Iraq war plan to Saddam. [3] Our enemies will feel compelled to join the new global arms race, and Russia may well be all too happy to help them.
President Bush has been forced on the defensive [4] in response to Putin, insisting that he has no intentions of attacking Russia and that Russia should not be trying to counterbalance our missile defense shield. But that's just another case of Bush's "do as we say, not as we do" arrogance, and you can bet Putin sees right through it.
Even Condoleezza Rice - whose primary specialty in academia was Cold War Russian policy - seems to be making things worse. [5] Is there anything she's good at in real life?
Regardless of how cool Bush thinks a missile defense shield might be, or more importantly how much money it can make for his friends, the reality is that the system will provoke far more attacks than it is likely to stop. As much as Bush has decimated our military through Iraq, the last thing we should do is piss off Putin and the Russians any more than we already have.
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
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Technorati Tags: Analysis [11] Russia [12] Missile Defense Shield [13] Cold War [14] Bush [15]