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Have President Bush and his cronies learned nothing from history? The Cuban Missile Crisis was a time when the world teetered ever so closely to nuclear war. Then, it was Premier Nikita Khrushchev who was planning to park strategic missiles in Cuba, just off the coast of Florida. Now, it’s President Bush getting ready to park ‘defensive’ interceptor missiles reportedly in northern Poland about 800 miles from Moscow.[WP]
Is Bush seriously trying to restart the cold war with Russia? He and Condolezza Rice can maintain all day long that the system is defensive in nature and that it will protect Israel and US bases in the Middle East from a rogue nuclear missile strike from the likes of Iran, but Russia sees the missile sites as a serious threat to Russian security and a serious intrusion into their sphere of influence. [CSMonitor] The Bush Administration has known this would anger Putin who stunned western leaders in February 2008 by accusing the Bush administration of trying to take over the world. General Nikolai Saltsov, then in charge of Russia’s ballistic arsenal, said last December: “I do not exclude the missile defense shield sites in Poland and the Czech Republic being chosen as targets for our intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
In a tit-for-tat … Putin now has a renewed interest in restoring relations with Cuba and is seeking to establish a military presence there once again. And, Russia has threatened an unspecified “military technical” response if the plans go through. If you’re as old as I am … all this rhetoric and political stupidity should bring back a few uncomfortable memories of times past.
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