August 22nd / 24th, 2008
"Cold War Re-starts on Bush’s Watch"
If you loved how our goof-off President George Bush delayed sending help to
victims of hurricane Katrina, you’ll really like his sequel. It’s called “
How I left the Georgian Republic stranded, and helped to re-start the Cold
War in the process”.
Honestly, it still amazes me that someone as corrupt as George Bush is, at
the same time, so stupid and grossly incompetent. Usually one characteristic
precludes the others. After all, evil, arrogant people are usually
brilliant. Oh well, chalk it up to sustained cocaine use in college.
In any event, Bush has blundered once again, and this time, he may have
undone everything Ronald Reagan did to make the world safe from Soviet
aggression.
Remember when Bush bragged that he had “looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes”
and “got a sense of his soul”? I am reminded of the time when, following
a meeting with Hitler, Lord Neville Chamberlain assured his countrymen that
Germany was no threat to England. Perhaps Chamberlain can be forgiven his
pre-World War II naivety. But Bush has no excuse for misreading the intentions
of Czar Vlad. In addition to the lessons of history at his fingertips, our
so-called commander in chief is surrounded by scores of advisors, including
Russia expert Condoleezza Rice, who should have known that Putin’s eyes were full
of deceptive aggression.
But even if we give Bush and Rice the benefit of the doubt on the front end,
there is no excuse for America’s delay in putting a halt to Russia’s
invasion of Georgia once it began, and for waiting a week to send in humanitarian
aid.
Said Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, “the response has been
inadequate, and the West failed to analyze the Russians’ intentions, and they
failed to react promptly to what has been happening”.
The fact is that Bush is scared of Putin because he knows that the Russian
bully is aware of our weaknesses. Specifically, Vlad knows that the U.S.
military is over extended in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Russia is one of our
biggest lender nations, who holds substantial ownership over America’s growing
debts and deficits. That’s why Putin knew he could march into Georgia
without fear of retribution from the West.
Now, in addition to Georgia’s current plight, her former Soviet block
brothers in Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Lithuania
fear similar invasions in the future.
I’m not one for policing the world or interfering in internal politics and
civil wars, but the United States helped to dismantle the Soviet Union so that
its satellite nations could be free. If those nations are attacked by their
former oppressors, then we have an obligation to stop those attacks.
The solution now is to move quickly to admit Georgia and other similarly
situated, vulnerable countries into NATO where Putin knows they will enjoy the
full protection of its collective membership. At the same time, we must pull
out of Iraq immediately (where we shouldn’t have gone in the first place,
and where civil strife will never subside), and we should stop the practice of
deficit spending.
This time Russia caught us with our pants down, and unwilling to respond.
But if we don’t make some changes, then next time we might be unable to
respond.
In terms that George W can understand, “We just can’t let Vlad be ’Putin’
one over on us again”.
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