From The Global Research
By F. William Engdahl

Moscow has correctly assessed that the announced Obama troop buildup in Afghanistan has no relevance to the stated aim of combatting the ‘Taliban’, but rather with a new attempt by the Pentagon strategists to encircle both Russia and China on Eurasia in order to retain US global military dominance. It is not waiting for a new policy from Washington. Rather Russia is acting to secure its perimeter in Central Asia through a series of calculated geopolitical moves reminiscent of the famous Great Game of more than a Century ago. The stakes in this geopolitical power game could not be higher—the issue of world war or peace in the coming decade.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen are asking Obama to double US troop presence in Afghanistan. Both Gates and Mullen said that while they’re thinking about the war in Afghanistan in terms of a 3-5 year time frame, their immediate goals are ‘unclear.’ That’s highly revealing. It is clear from the deliberate pattern over months, despite vehement protest from Pakistan’s government, of US bombing attacks on villages inside Pakistan, allegedly to hit Taliban targets, that the US intends to widen the conflict to Pakistan as well. What could be the possible aim?

Militarily, adding 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan could never secure peace in that wartorn tribal region. It has been documented that many of the groups whom the US Command labels ‘Taliban’ are in fact armed bands controlled by local warlords, and not ideologically close-knit Taliban cadre in any sense. By labelling them Taliban, Washington hopes to convince its NATO allies such as Germany to send their troops to fight in an unwinnable war. Afghanistan presently has an estimated 40% unemployment and some five million living below the poverty line. It has been ravaged by more than four decades of continuous war.

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From The Raw Story
By John Byrne

In Russia, democracy continues to erode.

Less than a year after then-President Vladimir Putin largely stage managed a transition from president to prime minister to get around a term limit law, and four years after the legislature gave Putin the power to appoint governors of his choosing, the Russian parliament has approved a measure that will strip a wide swath of suspects of their right to a jury trial.

By a 355-85 vote, the Kremlin-led lower house of parliament — the Duma — voted to give control of verdicts to a judge in cases of terrorism, hostage-taking, armed insurrection, sabotage and civil disturbances. The proposal will now go to the upper house, where approval is certain.

Ironically for those who lived in the United States during the Cold War, it was Russian communists who rebuked the measure, saying it was another step away from democracy under the Putin-led era.

“It’s another blow to democratic principles of justice,” Communist lawmaker Viktor Ilyukhin said.
Very few suspects get jury even today

Jury trials were introduced in 1993, having been barred for nearly three-quarters of a century during Communist rule.

Yet even as recently as 2006, only 700 of 1.2 million criminal cases were tried by a jury in Russia — so the move may be considered more symbolic than material for most accused of crimes.

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From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

Nearly 16 years ago, during the last transition from a President Bush to a Democrat, Moscow made an extraordinary gesture to Washington: The Kremlin supplied a summary of its intelligence information about secret U.S.-Iranian contacts in the 1980s.

The report was from a national security committee of the Russian Duma to Rep. Lee Hamilton, who had requested what might be in Moscow’s files as part of a task force investigation into whether the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 had interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s bid to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

The Russian report arrived late, via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, showing up on Jan. 11, 1993, but the contents were stunning. The Russians reported that their intelligence revealed that long-rumored meetings between Republicans and Iranians in Europe during Campaign 1980 had indeed occurred.

But this information went against what Hamilton and other members of the task force had decided to conclude, that there had been no such contacts. Hamilton had already rebuffed advice from his chief counsel, Lawrence Barcella, that the investigation be extended a few months because of other late-arriving evidence of Republican guilt.

Instead, Hamilton had ordered the probe wrapped up with a conclusion of Republican innocence. The Russian report just represented another complication, especially since the task force’s debunking report had already gone to the printers and was set for release two days later, on Jan. 13, 1993.

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From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

A CBS/Associated Press story yesterday reported that the man who runs the Pentagon’s anti-missile program, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, had warned incoming President-elect Barack Obama that any reversal of Bush/Cheney administration plans to install anti-ballistic missile missiles in Poland would “severely hurt” American interests.

It was a classic “stupid” story of the type that we now expect to get from our corporate media—basically a regurgitation of the statement of one self-interested official, backed up by a few supporting quotes from other government officials, and the usual “anonymous” official sources, and lacking any context or opposing viewpoints.

Let’s analyze this a little more. The Bush/Administration, since coming into office eight years ago, has been putting intense pressure on Russia by pressing to have NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders—also to have NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, to Russia’s south in central Asia. As one ratchet up in that pressure, the administration pushed to get anti-missile sites placed in some countries on Russia’s western border. One such proposed location was the Czech Republic, but that was rejected because of local opposition. Poland, however, agreed, after being pressed hard by the administration.

For US consumption, the move was presented as being aimed at Iran, which Bush and Cheney keep insisting is constructing nuclear bombs. No one could explain why anti-missile missiles placed in Poland, which sits in northern Europe, would have any utility in knocking down would be Iranian missiles aimed at Europe, or, for that matter, why Iran would want to fire nuclear missiles at Europe, which, in Britain and France, has a large and sophisticated nuclear stockpile capable of incinerating Iran. The real target of those missiles became clear when Georgia provoked Russia into sending its army into the breakaway state of Ossetia. Before that little military conflict, Poland had been resisting US pressure to agree to the missile sites, because of strong local opposition. After Russia moved its troops and tanks into Ossetia, and trounced Georgia’s military, Poland went ahead and approved the anti-missile site.

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From The S.F. Chronicle
By Robert Scheer

So, Vladimir Putin was right: It was Georgia that started the war with Russia, and once again it was President Bush who got caught in a lie. As the New York Times reported last week, “Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the long-standing Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.”

The Bush White House knew – but kept from the American public – facts concerning the provocation by Georgia’s U.S. trained forces killing civilians in the capital of South Ossetia before Russian troops crossed the border, which also has been documented in a BBC investigative report and by a growing consensus of other reliable sources.

No surprise, but it is a reminder of just how eager some are for a new Cold War and how indifferent they are to the truth of the matter. The career hawks are influential in both political parties, as was evidenced by the knee-jerk response of both presidential candidates that the Russians had launched a totally unprovoked attack.

Sen. John McCain, whose top foreign policy adviser had been a paid lobbyist for Georgia, was most eager to confront the Russians, while Sen. Barack Obama was a bit more cautious. But as recently as in his Oct. 29 infomercial, Obama promised to “curb Russian aggression,” which hardly suggests the change we need from the unilateral belligerence of the Bush foreign policy.

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From The Washington Post
By Guy Faulconbridge

The Kremlin on Wednesday rejected U.S. proposals aimed at easing concerns over a missile defense system in Europe and said it would try again to resolve the row once Barack Obama is in the White House.

Russia says the planned U.S. system will threaten its national security and that the administration of George W. Bush, which leaves office in January, has failed to allay its concerns.

“Russia is ready to cooperate with the United States on European security but considers the proposals that were sent are insufficient,” Itar-Tass news agency quoted an unidentified Kremlin source as saying.

“We will not give our agreement to these proposals and we will speak to the new administration,” said the source, who was quoted by Russia’s three main news agencies, an indication the remarks reflect official policy. The Kremlin press office declined to comment.

The Bush administration “is intent on putting the new U.S. president in a hopeless situation, so that he should take responsibility for what they concocted without him,” Tass quoted the source as saying.

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From The BBC News

Russia’s foreign minister has said it will abandon plans to station missiles in Kaliningrad if the US does not base part of a missile shield in Europe.

Sergei Lavrov said short-range Iskander missiles would only be deployed in the western enclave, which borders Poland, to neutralise any perceived US threat.

President Dmitri Medvedev unveiled the planned counter-measure a week ago.

The US insists the planned shield is designed solely to guard against attack by “rogue states”, such as Iran.

At present, the system will include a tracking radar in the Czech Republic and 10 missile interceptors in northern Poland. Moscow says they could threaten its own defences.

On Saturday, a senior aide to US President-elect Barack Obama said he had “made no commitment” to go ahead with plans to base the interceptors in Poland, despite an earlier statement by the Polish president saying that he had made such a promise.

From The Baltimore Sun
By Matthew Bunn and Andrew Newman

One in 10 American light bulbs is powered with fuel from dismantled Russian nuclear bombs, which means the lights in your house represent, in a real sense, bombs that will never go off. Potential nuclear bomb material that once was stored in the equivalent of a high school gym locker with a padlock that could be cut with a bolt-cutter now is stored in secure vaults with heavy steel doors.

But there is much more to be done to control the dangerous legacies of the Cold War, not only in Russia but around the world. We need Russia’s help to make it happen.

President Ronald Reagan is often remembered as the consummate Cold War hawk, describing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” But as U.S.-Russian relations chill, we should remember that in Mr. Reagan’s second term, he moderated his rhetoric and worked with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to negotiate unprecedented cuts in nuclear weapons.

Today, the United States and Europe must respond to Russia’s military behavior in Georgia and elsewhere in its former empire. But they must also maintain a working relationship with Russia to continue vital cooperation between Russian and U.S. experts to reduce nuclear weapons and keep them out of terrorists’ hands.

Russia needs to act against nuclear corruption and insider threats, provide the necessary funding to sustain high levels of security after U.S. assistance phases out, and build a stronger “security culture” among nuclear staff (so security doors no longer will be propped open for convenience or intrusion detectors turned off to put an end to their occasional false alarms). It also must strengthen nuclear security regulations and enforcement and consolidate its stockpiles in fewer locations. Without U.S. and Russian experts working together, there is much less chance that Russia will take these vital steps.

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From In These Times
By David Sirota

When I worked for then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the late 1990s, Washington was in the panting throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned my boss’s opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress. Nobody guessed that a few years later, our country would become the globe’s newest U.S.S.R.: The United States’ Socialist Republic.

Yes, a red flag is rising over the Capitol, only the laborer’s hammer and sickle has been replaced by a baron’s top hat and monocle. America is Amerika, and throughout Washington a socialist rallying cry echoes: Politicians and lobbyists of the world unite! — unite to rescue Wall Street capitalists with a $700 billion taxpayer bailout.

Though socialism seems new in the U.S., it isn’t. Using public resources and government power to control the economy is as Amerikan as the Pentagon and the Patent Office. And the problem is not socialism itself, but our uniquely destructive version of it. Amerika’s is not the democratic socialism of many countries. Ours is kleptocratic socialism — the objective is theft.

Unlike European comrades, our socialists rarely mandate returns on taxpayer investments. The same 19th century socialism that gave the Mountain West to railroad companies became a 20th century socialism subsidizing oil and drug industry profits. Now, our 21st century socialists propose giving financial industry con men the national credit card, confirming Marx’s theory that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.

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From True Blue Liberal
By William John Cox

When the CIA engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1953 in favor of the more compliant Shah, who would have ever thought that 26 years later the nation’s youth would invade our embassy and take our diplomats as hostages? When our president’s national security advisor instigated secret support for the Afghanistan Mujahideen the same year in their resistance against the Russian army, who would have imagined that 22 years later one of the Mujahideen leaders, Osama bin Laden, would direct the 9-11 attacks on America? When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 without just cause, who could have foreseen that five years later as many as a million Iraqis have been killed, tens of thousands of American soldiers have been grievously wounded or died, more than a trillion tax dollars have been wasted, and our troops are still not welcomed as liberators? When the CIA and the U.S. ambassador secretly engineered the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003 and after the U.S. encouraged the Israeli-trained Georgian army to invade the disputed enclave of South Ossetia five years later, who could have predicted Russian peacekeepers would be killed causing Russia to invade Georgia and overrun its lilliputian army provided by U.S. taxpayers? The only thing for certain to result from all such Machiavellian maneuvers is chaos, pure chaos.

The classical theory set forth in Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick in 1987 is that “a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.” Basically, any attempt to accurately discern outcomes from discrete and random inputs is much like reading entrails or trying to guess which card will be dealt after God reshuffles the deck “under the table” after each hand.

From a political standpoint, chaos theory requires us to consider the effect of a vice president flapping his lips on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf or in the former U.S.S.R. republic of Georgia on starting World War III or Cold War II.

In May 2007, Vice President Cheney threatened that, “With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike, we’ll keep the sea lanes open.” And, “We’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.”
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