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POPSVEE Day in Alameda, California, we practiced duck-and-cover as well as earthquake drills. Nothing quaint or or historic about it then. Here’s Reagan speechwriter Anthony R. Dolan at the Wall Street Journal on the power of “Four Little Words” … you remember them: “Tear down that wall” … and the earth-shaking ideas they represented as well as the action that backed them. The popular myth is that the wall kind of toppled over by itself, with a little push from people power. That of course ignores not only the prior 44 years of Cold War … interspersed with several hot ones that cost us tens of thousands of American lives … it also ignores the massive military buildup of the 1980s, the encouragement of liberation movements behind the Iron Curtain, the tough engagement with old-school Soviet leaders and, not least, the cordial engagement with a Soviet leader who realized it was time to throw in the towel. An atmosphere was finally created in which people felt like they could
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POPSRussia Reconsiders "There's no question that Stalin is undergoing a sort of renaissance in Russia. Despite the many millions killed or sent to labor camps during his reign, many now view his rule with a sort of hazy nostalgia. "The cynical position of the Stalinphobes is that only innocent people were kept in the gulag," he said. "Criminals who violated the law were kept in the gulag. And let the Western reader ask himself, should criminals be kept in spas or resort hotels?" Meanwhile, Stalin's image and name, systematically bleached out as the waning Soviet empire began to grapple with its bloody past, are creeping back into Russian life. His name was restored this fall to a Moscow metro station. His unmistakable mustached face beams from the wall of Soviet Meatpies, a kitschy diner downtown."
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POPSRUSSIA TO ADOPT FIRST STRIKE NUCLEAR POLICY It's that damned Putin! Russia is rebuilding its military...I imagine they mean local, contained nuclear strikes. Such as: theater nuclear weapons....but, it could escalate between "major players"....dammit
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POPSObama’s French Lesson
newest provocation did not warrant the imposition of tougher sanctions. Do the tally. In return for selling out Poland and the Czech Republic by unilaterally abrogating a missile-defense security arrangement that Russia had demanded be abrogated, we get from Russia . . . what? An oblique hint, of possible support, for unspecified sanctions, grudgingly offered and of dubious authority " and, in any case, leading nowhere because the Chinese have remained resolute against any Security Council sanctions. Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling, and pious concern about Iran’s nuclear program " whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama’s naïveté.
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POPSIn Which Obama Has A General Problem, Just Like A Real President* The tug-o-war playground politics of the matter aside, there is still the fact of war in Afghanistan, a persistent global threat, and the rapidly diminishing credibility of the United States as a stalwart, moral force in the world, from the limp handling of Iran to the delivery of tribute to Vladimir Putin, and now the dawdling and dithering over the erstwhile good war. For all their squawking about us, the Euros don’t need us to be another EU member. They need someone to do the dirty work. Ditto the Arabs. China and Russia have got to be enjoying this, though. On second thought, there is a sort of double-reverse presidential precedent to this crisis. It’s Obama as McClellan. Not exactly Lincolnesque, but very Lincoln-proximate. Totally related: Victor Davis Hanson at NRO looks at Two-Front Wars, Theirs and Ours and comes away with something other than the currently fashionable doom-and-gloom mongering. It’s al-Qaeda after eight years of war, on the ropes and desperate.
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POPSThe Long Retreat ~ Part I by Mark Steyn to it, perhaps not publicly (just as the US agreement to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey was not make public during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The Obama Administration's diplomatic strategy is, I believe, wise and comprehensive"but it needs to show more than public concessions over time. A few diplomatic victories wouldn't hurt. Golly. We know, thanks to Jimmy Carter, Joe Klein, and many others, that we critics of President Obama’s health-care policy are by definition racist. Has criticism of Obama’s foreign policy also been deemed racist? Because one can certainly detect the first faint seeds of doubt germinating in dear old Joe’s soon-to-be-racist breast: The Obama administration “needs to show more than public concessions over time” " because otherwise the entire planet may get the vague impression that that’s all there is . Especially if your preemptive capitulations are as felicitously timed as the missile-defense announcement, stiffing the Poles . .
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POPS The Long Retreat ~ Part II by Mark Steyn Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-Il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? Okay, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever farther west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon . . . Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto tsar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire " not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a . . .
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POPSNow Venezuela Wants to Go Nuclear Others are a little more skeptical, and rightly so. The Hudson Institute’s David Satter wrote yesterday (emphasis ours): The intention of Russia to help Venezuela develop a nuclear power plant is no more innocent than the help that Russia gave to Iran. Both Russia and Venezuela will emphasize that Venezuela has no intention of creating a nuclear weapon. But by facilitating contact between Russian and Venezuelan officials in the area of nuclear energy, the stage is set for black-market operations involving technology that can be used in nuclear weapons. Russian help for Venezuela can provide a cover for the development of nuclear weapons. Perhaps more important, it opens up a new channel for the transfer of Russian nuclear know-how"this time by way of Venezuela"to the enemies of the U.S. As the Trumpet has explained , Hugo Chávez has put Venezuela at the vanguard of the growing anti-American movement in Latin America.
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POPSPresident Pantywaist Restores The Satellite States to Their Former Owner Despite propaganda to the contrary, 58 per cent of Poles were in favour of the missile shield. But small nations must assess the political will of larger powers. Thanks to President Pantywaist’s supine policies, the former satellite states can see that they are fast returning to their former status. The American umbrella cannot be relied upon on a rainy day. They have been here before. Poles remember how a leftist US president sold them out to Russia at Tehran and Yalta. The former Czechoslovakia was betrayed twice: in 1938 and 1945. If the word is out that America is in retreat, it will soon find it has no friends. The satellites will pragmatically accept their restored subordination, without openly acknowledging it, and co-operate with their dangerous neighbour, ushering in a new generation of Finlandisation. Bringing unstable states like Georgia into Nato would be a liability, not a defence. The crazy notion of a US-Nato-Russian combined defence policy . . .
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POPSRussia to modernize & train Cuban military Oh Joy! You can bet this Dem President won't deal with this potential "missile crisis". Haven't we been here before? As the Administration forces us backwards, Putin takes over. Ya think he'll be nice to us then?
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POPSObama Helps Strengthen General Electric-Putin Ties "U.S. companies have arguably lost out to some European companies in joint ventures, and better diplomacy will likely improve the chances for investors in the strategic sectors of the Russian economy," said Carlo Gallo, senior Russia analyst at London-based consultancy Control Risks. GE CEO Jeff Immelt sits on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and GE owns MSNBC, the network famously friendly to Obama. By: Timothy P. Carney Examiner Columnist 09/17/09
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POPSAnother brilliant move by Obama.... Changing one word in its name, the Human Rights Council instantly resumed its former practices: ignoring massive human rights violations around the globe and condemning Israel. Rest here>>> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTFlNGRjMDdiNTU5NDExYWZkN2NjMjkxNTY3ODRmMGI= Poles, Czechs Decry Obama's "Betrayal".... http://www.weaselzippers.net/blog/2009/09/poles-czechs-decry-obamas-betrayal.html.
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POPSRA's Daily Russian News Blast US to modify or jettison missile defense plans? NATO chief to meet with Russian envoy; Lukaschenko sends out mixed messages. South Ossetia denies book burning; think tank leader says Putin could be heading for Brehznev-style decades in power; Medvedev finds inspiration on blogosphere. Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has suggested the traditional ally of Russia must 'move away from dependence on just one country, even one that is near and dear to us'. The Moscow Times reports that the authoritarian leader has emphasized ties with Russia, whilst on a rare visit to EU-member state Lithuania. The Russian Foreign Minstry has said that the criminal investigation into charges of forgery against RIA Novosti's Tbilisi bureau chief is politically motivated. South Ossetia has denied bonfire-style burning of Georgian books and other classic works at the state university. An op-ed contributor in the Moscow Times is disturbed by what makes it onto Russian bookshelves.
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POPSObama Heads For Foreign Policy Disaster The U.S. is applying pressure to Israel, because Israel is susceptible to U.S. pressure, in hopes of gaining concessions from the Palestinians, who are not. The process is the diplomatic equivalent of a drunk searching for his key under the streetlamp"because it's brighter there. The approach has never worked before, but repeated failure does not seem to have discouraged Obama from trying yet again. Not everything that goes wrong in the world is the president's fault, of course. Vladimir Putin's Russia would behave aggressively no matter who was president, just as any president would confront the same unappealing range of options in Pakistan. But the very intractability of such problems makes it more important to do right what can be done right. Despite the domestic focus of these early months of his presidency, Barack Obama thinks of himself as a foreign policy thinker above all, according to those who know him best. His confidence is undiminished by his lack . . .
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POPSU.S. Backs Away From Missile Shield Analysis: Demise of U.S. shield may embolden Russia hawks The U.S. move on the shield -- due to be announced later on Thursday but already flagged by Czech and Polish officials -- removes at a stroke the biggest outstanding obstacle to bilateral relations between the former superpowers and will be hailed by the Kremlin as a big victory. Russia's leaders have fiercely resisted the missile shield, saying it would upset regional security because it could be used to neutralise Moscow's vast nuclear arsenal. Ignoring U.S. assurances that the system was not targeted at Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev threatened last year to station missiles in a Russian enclave near Poland if the United States implemented the plan. But the shield's demise in its originally planned form may also have unintended consequences in the former Soviet bloc. Russian diplomacy is largely a zero-sum game and relies on projecting hard power to force gains, as in last year's war with Georgia over the . .
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POPSHydroelectric Power Plant -- Victim Recovery Notice how they are saying "United Russia" alot! Kinda like the United States....Are they going to reintegrate some of the republics from the old Soviet Regime ?? His lordship Putin wants to do just that I bet.....
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POPSRussian nuke subs off USA East Coast
It seems the USA's non-stop lifetime of foreign wars and aggression is getting some push back. With impunity the USA sails nuke subs and aircraft carriers on the coast of Iran and Iraq...did the same in Vietnam....then blames the natives when they get "restless." We're also building a missile base in Poland, on the Russian border. We got troops and funding for the Republic of Georgia...we're trying to get to the world's largest reserve of gas and oil, in the Caspian Sea. If you go into a bear's cave, imo, and start poking around, we shouldn't be surprise if the beast becomes upset. I think this...along with the renewed air flights of nuke weapons bombers near the USA...and Russian making alliances in South America...shows a new Cold War has started: Cold War Two. Or Cold War Reheated. Or we're on 'pre-heat," for the baking up of new tensions. I'd suggest we BUY any oil and gas we might need and give up trying to steal it...and make progress with alternative energi
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POPSThe Power Vertical Biden said "Russia has to make some very difficult, calculated decisions" and that Washington "vastly" underestimates its hand vis-à-vis the Kremlin: The reality is the Russians are where they are. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable. Biden went on to say that the Russian leaders "aren't absolute average-intellect ideologues who are clinging to something nobody believes in. They're pretty pragmatic in the end."
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POPSGovernment Hype Against Skype and VoIP--"Security Threat" It's not just Russia that is opposed to private internet telephony applications. Buried deep in the article the real reason comes out: Delegates at the meeting also warned that it has been impossible for police to spy on VoIP conversations The NSA has admitted the same thing here --enough to tap the hacker market to find a "solution". (Offering big money to those who would help break our privacy, for their own gain). Too bad. It's not only cheap to place calls this way, but so far very private.
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POPSMedvedev Resets The "Reset Summit" Mr Medvedev, speaking at the G8, also appeared to change his tone on the missile defence shield itself. During Mr Obama's visit he told the US leader, using markedly softer language than normal, that "no one is saying that missile defence is harmful in itself or that it poses a threat to someone". But in Italy on Friday, Mr Medvedev returned to the Kremlin's traditional posture on the system, describing it as "harmful" and "threatening to Russia". Aaaaand we're back to square one --- reset indeed. As I noted earlier in the week, the Russians are giddy that they pried loose a key concession from Obama in the form of linking strategic nuclear cuts to missile defense. Charles Krauthammer observes that not only is this linkage a terrible idea, but that Obama's faith in the power of anachronistic arms control mechanisms is comical ... and quite dangerous: Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure
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