Russia In A Missile Snit

(Maxim Shipenkov/European Pressphoto Agency)

Putin prodigy, President Medvedev read his prepared script to test America's resolve with perfect aplomb in front of invited guests and press at the Kremlin. It was really intended for an audience of one, President-elect Barack Obama. From St George's Hall the State of the Nation extravaganza delivered tough talk and threats of radio jamming as the ABM or antiballistic missile system encroaches on Russian military power. The Putinites remain ticked off about the long standing issue of the Unites States placing interceptor missiles in Eastern Europe, remember Poland, which they consider their back yard. Except, the countries involved have full fledged members ship in US-led NATO, which is the chicken bone really stuck in their craw. (Guneev Sergey/Bloomberg News)

That Russian threat came dripping with honey:

Medvedev made similar comments in his address: "Let me stress that we don't have problems with the American people. We don't have an inborn anti-Americanism. And we hope that our partners, the new U.S. administration, will make a choice in favor of full-fledged relationswith Russia."

This is the first salvo less than 24 hours after Barack Obama's historic election as the 44th president of United States that also goes by the nickname, Leader of the Free World. Dimitry, showing no diplomacy skills, sent Barack Obama an old fashioned telegraph acknowledging his accomplishment by saying he looked forward to a constructive dialogue. How quaint. No mention of the new realities in America's political landscape made the cut into the final draft of his speech after scheduling it twice before. Kind of interesting the stinging speech actually gets delivered the day after the US election. President Medvedev, a tender 43 year old rookie and his swinging Svengali, Vladimir, threw the first mud pie by baldly stated their belief that America is responsible for the global financial decimation while crassly calling America selfish in its foreign policy aims. Obama's historic election win was major league downplayed in a tightly state controlled Russian media.

Ministers of much lower rank spoke a tad more cordially of solving problems together. But the ominous utterances of the Russian president did not focus on cash but weapons of war. A Iskander-M surface to surface ballistic missile deployment to the Baltic area of Kaliningrad is a direct counter to the interceptor missiles the US places in Poland and the Czech Republic. Good thing Barack President-elect Obama got his first super double secret spies are here doing this in the dark meeting today. Kaliningrad had a starring role in the Cold War saga as a containment zone on the foremost outer ring of defending Russia with ample amounts of military matériel and personnel.

It is unclear whether the Iskanders to be deployed in Kaliningrad will have a nuclear payload.

Analysts say the Iskanders will probably be positioned with Russia's 152nd missile brigade, near Chernyakhovsk. Medvedev said on Wednesday that radio jamming from Kaliningrad would also be used to disrupt the US anti-missile system.

The president said plans to disband, by 2010, three missile regiments based in Russia's Kaluga region near Moscow had been cancelled in respond to Washington's anti-missile scheme.

While American pols have been immersed in The Obama Epic, former president Vladimir has stealthily moved to position himself to legally retake the Russian presidency. Instead of Barack Obama staring down Dimitry Medevedev, who gave an aggressive tough Russian national security speech, he could find himself face to face with the steely-eyed jdo chopping Putin, whose soul a junior George W. Bush completely misread, in less than a year in a Kremlin power play to gain Putin approval of two thirds of the State Duma. Prime Minister Putin, the former KB spymaster, looks at the missiles in his back yard as an act of war. He's also on the move making nice with Italy's three time peacock Premier, Silvio Berlusconi, getting a head start on an Obama Administration as Medvedev travels to the South Caucasus to follow up on Putin's leadoff discussions with him as well. Russia was not on the list of 9 world leaders Obama spoke with today to thank for their congratulatory calls.

Marshall L. Goldman writes an account of Russia's mounting economic and energy power in Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia. Putin systematically acquires the power under state control while leveraging its oil for more cachet around the world in a series of intrigues and political knife fights to control the remaining Russian oligarchs.

Putin Returns Russia to Cold War Arms Race

Casting a peaceful revamped hammer and sickle nation as stuck watching in horror as the evil US empire beefs up on European based missile defense shields against a benevolent Mother Russia is something only a daring former head KGB spy like Putin would pull off with a straight face. His hemispheric example of closing Soviet missile bases in former client states, Vietnam and Cuba, showed Russia heeding concerns. But now, the US is playing war games in his backyard and he says get off his lawn. Time's Man of the Year, Vlad, gets a three-fer out of his reluctant warrior speech in front of the full State Council. He charts the forced march Russia is on for Dmitry Medvedev, his handpicked presidential puppet, as he elevates/retires to Prime Minister with a focus on "Special" Projects to match or trounce US arms efforts.

"It's not our fault. We didn't start it . . . funneling multibillions of dollars into developing weapons systems," Putin declared in what may be his final major address before he leaves the Kremlin after presidential elections March 2, to become prime minister.


"Russia has and always will have a response to these new challenges," Putin declared. "Over the next few years, Russia will start production of new types of arms, with the same or even superior specifications compared to those available to other nations."

Putin outright accuses the US and NATO of making Russia enter the arms race because of their perceived hegemony in the trillion dollar armament market. But the real salt in Putin's wound are US bases and missile stations in what were formerly USSR territorial possessions; Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria. His attack dog speech is also for Russian public consumption as the whiff of going on a war footing is based on his need to protect the perceived encroachment of Russia's borders.

Pooty-Poot, as a diplomacy challenged Bush nicknamed Putin, is on a drive to regain superpower status while putting the world on notice. Russia's oligarchy is changing hands with more Putin allies taking control of the economic levers. Putin ruthlessly quashed Russian internal dissent in a blazing fireball of democratic destruction by pre-emptively striking to stop cold a political rival from gaining access to the March ballot. OSCE, international election monitors walked away in protest. More members of the press have been murdered in Moscow and a former spy famously poisoned in London to keep them permanently silent.

The Kremlin is spinning Putin's pungent war machine rhetoric into something much more vanilla for world audiences. Putin's peevishness stems from stinging critiques delivered from the West on his backing out of the 1990 Conventional Forces of Europe Treaty which had caps on aircraft and other military hardware. Trust, but verify, as Reagan put it, has a new spin. The west also has deep concerns on the status of nuclear materials as new alliances shift with Russian partners - like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadimejad.





For centuries, classic Literature captures much of the genius and life sorrows Russians endured. Most recently, a thoughtful and intriguing work was finished before the gunning down of one Russia's best journalists in the foyer of her apartment. Ana Politkovskaya penned most of her final thoughts in books including the excellent, A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death In Putin's Russia.

Iraq: An Irresistible Invasion Magnet

Iraq has the mysterious magnet to attract sovereign nations to invade to their own peril. Once America invaded it, surged it and now emptied its own treasury and depleted the military to "conquer" Iraq, Turkey decided mulish roving bands of independence-minded PKK rebels was worth crossing their border into Iraq's Kurdish territory. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's gave a television address to announce his military decision after the Turkish cabinet authorized this a month ago. No politician in the US who voted for the Iraq Debacle or championed it with fake vials trotted out to the UN, is in much of a position to say Iraq is a sovereign nation - Turkey cannot invade. International irony on military parade.

Catastrophic failure of diplomacy results from not building any leverage points for negotiations, so really big armored stuff that kills innocents and terrorists alike is seen as the ultimate final solution. Since this is a hot zone right now, the US's fashionista Secretary of State is globetrotting off to Ethiopia, then Brussels next week. That Middle East diplomatic whatever in Annapolis, MD, last week got a collective yawn around the world while Bush tried to make it the new new cornerstone of his crumbled legacy with Rice's able assistance in appointing a new ME envoy with tons of shiny stars from his military career. During Katrina, Dr. Condoleeza Rice was in New York City stocking up on Ferragamos and attending the Broadway play Sir Spamalot! She's not exactly the FedEx of Diplomacy - getting there on time and stuff. But Diplomacy would have to be a premium tool used by the US first and this is a prime example of a loss of America's moral authority. Turkey is a member of NATO and an ally - sheesh, one can imagine just how US enemies are now trembling and cowering in fear. Osama's latest YouTube submission put paid to that.

Soon after, the Turkish government secured parliamentary approval for cross-border military operations into northern Iraq. The United States and the Iraqi government are keen to avert a large scale incursion.

Ankara nevertheless made it clear that it would be keeping its options open and refused to rule out a military response to any PKK activity.

The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, has waged a 23-year armed campign for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey's southeast. The conflict has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

"It is an operation against a very precise target and this is not a surprise given that Turkey has said and repeated (sic) that it was going to crack down on terrorists in northern Iraq," Kuloglu told television channel NTV.

Turkey, for right now a moderate Muslim power, invades northern Iraq under the control of Kurds who now have some of the richest oil deposits in the world plus people on both sides of the border that want an independent state; Kurdistan, carved out of both nations. There are 100,000 angry and anxious Turkish troops sitting on the Iraqi border after losing 12 men in rebel sniper attacks and having 8 captured. Last month, George Bush pledged to share the USA's intelligence (er, um, cough, nevermind...) on the PKK rebels with Turkey. The ironic pancake flipside to that is Turkey has a map courtesy of the US to hit the Kurdish rebels with military strikes after instituting a no-fly zone in the 1990's to protect that area from Saddam Hussein.


Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence is from Aliza Markus, an award-winning Boston Globe reporter with 8 years invested in covering the PKK and its origins.

Rice's Undercooked Diplomacy

Noted Russian expert and US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, went to Moscow to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin. Vlad was not in the mood to be polite to Condi. Witnessing the shock and awe of Putin's delivery was US Secretary of Defense, Robert "Bob" Gates. Makes one wonder if the intelligence for an expected warm welcome was a slam dunk into a frigid Russian lake next to Putin's dacha. Imagine the call reporting back to the US president who had looked into Pooty-Poot's (Bush's nickname for the guy with a nuclear arsenal too) blazing eyes and knew his soul. This is what American foreign policy consists of these days. In a snippy granular rejoinder, Rice met with Russian Human Rights activists in Moscow at the Ambassador's residence, Spaso House, expressing opposition to Putin's Soviet era policies and his blatant diminishment of democratic ideals.

Mr. Putin’s surprise suggestion last month that he might yet remain in power — possibly as a newly empowered prime minister, possibly as the eminence atop the “party of power” — has left the White House stumped. The administration is uncertain how to deal with a man who has consolidated power almost exclusively in his own hands, even as Mr. Bush continues to call Mr. Putin “my friend.”

That is why a certain discomfort regarding Mr. Putin’s future hovered over two days of talks here attended by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

“If you don’t have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,” Ms. Rice said Saturday, raising concerns about the state of Russia’s judiciary, legislative branch and news media, but declining to criticize Mr. Putin by name.

The administration’s occasional scoldings have accomplished little except to harden anti-American views at the Kremlin and in the state news media. (A swaggering Mr. Putin opened the discussions on Friday with a sarcastic harangue over the American plans for missile defense.)

Rice, determined to cook up one honeymoon success out of thin air on her worldwide trip, jetted back into the Israel/Palestine 2000 year old dust-up for a 2007 West Bank photo-op throwing bon mots of getting the Peace process back on track. Yawn. Note to Condi - you have no worries on winning a Nobel Peace prize. Ever. Take heart in the fact that you are a certified head to toe fashionista though.

"We frankly have better things to do than invite people to Annapolis for a photo op," she said.

Israelis and Palestinians, Rice added, are making their "most serious effort" in years to resolve the conflict.

"Frankly, it's time for the establishment of a Palestinian state," she added.

Rice is on a four-day shuttle mission, trying to create some common ground ahead of the meeting. A State Department official hinted on Sunday that the conference might be postponed because of the gaps between the two sides. (AP Pool Photo/Muhammad Muheisen)

Meanwhile, Putin dismissed rampant rumors of an assassination attempt, confirming his intention to meet with Iranians in Tehran at the Caspian Summit and privately with President Ahmadinejad. Germany and Russia focused on trade talks during their high level discussions. Along with Germany's chancellor, Anne Merkel, he gave a press conference outlining his intent.

"A reliable source in one of the Russian special services, has received information from several sources outside Russia, that during the president of Russia's visit to Tehran an assassination attempt is being plotted," Interfax said.

Russian media are mostly controlled by the government and it would be unthinkable for a major Moscow news organization to report an alleged plot against the president without prior official approval.

But a planned private meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could give him a chance to seek a compromise over Tehran's nuclear program and to demonstrate his independence from Washington on Middle East issues.

Oh dear, this stuff is going to keep John LeCarre on his laptop for the next twenty years. This is a Russian president's first visit since the days of Joseph Stalin. That leaves many western establishments with a cold feeling that may perhaps be warmed up with a keepsake Iron curtain.


More on Condolezza Rice, her history and stunning rise can be found in the 2007 release from Marcus Mabry, Twice As Good: Condoleeza Rice and the Path to Power. Twice as good refers to a piece of conventional wisdom in the African American community that one has to be twice as good to merit the same opportunities as Caucasians. W.E.B. Du Bois called it the Talented Tenth.

New Silk Road has Mighty River of Oil

What is old becomes new again just by changing the players, not the game. World domination in trade was the province of a superpower like the USA. America cemented its standing by helping to found a little organization called NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organization, complete wih a standing Army - always under the command of an American. Europe got their collection of smaller countries together to up their trading, political and potentially military clout to form something called the EU - European union. There are Asian versions that meet; APEC, ASEAN with Climate Change dominating the agenda.

Long suspicious and resentful of NATO, Russia and China - former bitter enemies, are creating a strategic alliance that is fraught with peril and possibility. SCO is the Shanghai Co-operation Organization. To get into that exclusive nation club next to presidents Putin and Jintao, requires one or more of the following: massive energy provider, hungry energy consumer with spare megabucks/rubles/yuan with nothing to do but sit there collecting compound interest or a teeny tiny poor country bordering the biggies for a pipeline or ahem, an oil road - the new Silk Road is a mighty flowing river of oil.

To celebrate an engagement and show a bit of the Central Asia
dowry, China and Russia just started the biggest joint military war game, together. Two, million "man" armies practicing together with the USA only able to watch from a pay per view spy satellite. Top it off with a terribly unpopular incompetent US president and an ineffective US Secretary of State - a supposed Russian expert with a PhD, and America is feeling a bit jilted. Iran, Pakistan, India, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan are bringing flowers and candy to gain entrance into the SCO. Two or more of that group have nuclear bombs or technology and three of that group are still dating America for the foreign policy goodies. Besides it takes an awful lot of oil to make armies that big work effectively.

Pretty sure the American media will catch on sometime during the SCO's energetic honeymoon phase as the balance of power rocks American professional navel gazing. Russia is reverting back to a Cold War stance by resuming their own patrolling of the global skies. Its been sixteen years since Russia last did it and you can bet your last penny, pound or paisa, they "pimped their rides" with amazing new technology.

Russia and China invited Iran's bombastic president to dinner for a quickie tête - à - tête at an Anti-US summit. The message to America is way past subliminal.

The ancient Silk Road is famous for opening trade to new partners in Europe. Tourists traveled to Afghanistan and China to partake of the scenic beauty and the dangerous trek. Venetian Marco Polo (1254 - 1324 CE) is credited with founding it.

History has a way of repeating itself. Books illuminate past mistakes while providing illumination for those so inclined. An elegant, illustrated version of The Silk Road by Frances Woods is a keeper. Two thousand years of history in this review. Russian and Chinese history, especially since Stalin and Mao are excellent maps for current events under the new leaders.