Ivan Wants To Play
Brinksmanship from a Russky general who rather idiotically threatens Poland with nukes if the Poles go ahead with the U.S. missile defense program. Here’s Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn:
“Poland, by deploying (the system) is exposing itself to a strike — 100 percent.”
Sounds like windy bullying. Sounds like the Russkies just explained why missile defense is a great idea for Europe. Someone needs to tell the Russian Foreign Ministry, which is still in a froth that anyone would think Russia is a threat.
Sounds like we’ll be needing a president who won’t whinge or dither, and who can embolden Europe likewise. OK, that’s probably the hardest nut to crack in this particular bowl of nuts. Russkies, like the Chinese, like throwing their weight around and benefit from everyone else’s nervous politeness. Blumenthal and Gaffin at The Weekly Standard note Georgia’s troubling upside for China … and recommends the United States get serious about reasserting itself as a world power. Here’s another guy who probably sees an upside to western impotence, at the hands of his Russky pals: A’jad in his latest Zionist-bashing session promises, “We will witness the dismantling of the corrupt regime in a very near future.”
None of it looks good. It ain’t your dad’s Cold War.
But Reuters talks to assorted military experts who say the Russian military’s Georgia outing reveals some shortcomings. Not to be out done, here are some Georgians mocking the Ivans outside their embassy in Tblisi. As Instapundit notes, it’s gotta hurt:
“To the Russian Army from the Georgian people”
That’s the spirit. To paraphrase John McCain, if we aren’t all Georgians yet, we ought to be.
One of the great things about Russia these days is what was once a closed state-controlled kleptocracy is now an internationally connected market-driven kleptocracy. Nuclear holocaust is bad for business. Sooner or later, if the skittish kittens of Europe can be herded along with U.S. encouragement, the Ivans will figure out Cold War and rolling across borders in tanks is also bad for business.* Meanwhile, a U.S. armor base or two along with those missile bases in Poland might help lead Ivan not into temptation, even if it does make Ivan squawk.
Frederick Kagan at the National Review, at the end of his piece contrasting Putin and his Soviet forebears, notes the difficulty and perhaps unlikelihood of tough economic measures.
More impotent handwringing from the right and left follows, with a nod to Real Clear Politics:
Der Spiegel’s Hans Juergen Schlamp, “The Time of the Wimps.”
NY Post’s Ralph Peters, “The Peace-At-Any-Price Peril.”
NY Times’s Tom Friedman, “What Did We Expect.”
Mark Safranski, Pajamas Media, “Let’s Not Rush Into Cold War.”
* For peaceniks unclear on the concept, that means without benefit of international law, against free nations, whose leaders are not nuke-lusting genocidal megalomaniacs who have repeatedly attempted to take over the world’s major oil supplies. You know, that kind of thing.
Topics: America, China, Europe, Iran, military, money
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:00 pm on Wednesday, August 20, 2008
3 Responses to “Ivan Wants To Play”
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August 21st, 2008 at 1:09 am
Welcome back.
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/clickpix_blogs_on_a_roll/crittendens_bac.php
August 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
[...] News » News Ivan Wants To Play2008-08-21 16:35:06Upside for China … and Gaffin at The Weekly Standard note Georgia’s troubling [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Your father’s Cold War was never your father’s Cold War. The Soviet Union was a monolith made of bad concrete. Today’s Russia is that same monolith after the concrete has had a few decades to deteriorate. Russia’s post Czarist leadership has long been wasteful of lives and talent, and all the beloved myth’s of the bloviating class doesn’t change a thing.
A smaller military, American trained, using Soviet Equipment older than what the Russians had available, delayed the Russians long enough for the United States to pull off one of the most audacious bluffs in the history of warfare. By standing as well as they did, by hurting the Russians as deeply as they did, the Georgians set the stage for the first American C17 to land at Tblisi to have an impact far beyond what it could have had otherwise.
From the behavior of the Russain 38th Army in Georgia I have to ask if Russia’s control over that force is as strong as Moscow wants us to think. The recent threat by Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn: tells me the rot may well extend throughout Russian government, and Putin now finds him astride a pissed off slippery tiger. He seeks to control chaos when he hasn’t the tools to corral dirt.
A crumbling infrastructure, a dying people, and a disintegrating social order. All under the oft disregarded direction of a man with a delusional view of his enemies. A man asking his generals how long before Russia can declare victory, but, unlike Gorbachev, none of Putin’s men has the wisdom to realize that Russia has already lost.