War in Ukraine 16Apr2024

 

“The first dawn of 2023" by the fallen warrior Pavlo Petrychenko

Ukraine won’t win, according to Zelenskyy, if it doesn’t get supplies from the US.

House Democrats are annoyed that Speaker Johnson isn’t just putting the Senate Ukraine bill on the floor for an up or down vote.

Ukraine defended a power plant, but ran out of anti-aircraft missiles. The plant was gutted.

Zelenskyy was interviewed by PBS. He feels the West is very concerned about the consequences of a possible Ukrainian victory, but feels the consequences of a Ukrainian defeat are very much in the immediate future and are quite dire.

Ukrainians very aware of how Israel and Ukraine get very different levels of protection from allies.

“two years of escalation management” has given Russia time to recover and to rebuild its army. Putin has no reason to stop now.

Foreign Affairs puts out a rather silly piece on peace talks in March 2022. I’ve looked into these talks myself. They had no chance of succeeding. “certain high-browed armchair strategists” were convinced that the talks had a serious chance. They didn’t. Writers from the Polish Institute of International Affairs did a debunking thread on the piece. The Russian “goal was to present the Ukrainian side with an ultimatum…”

From a piece in the Economist: “An agreement made with a compulsive liar probably means only one thing: him regrouping, rearming and trying for more in two or three years.” Putin still has maximalist aims.

https://balloon-juice.com/2024/04/16/war-for-ukraine-day-783-the-gop-house-majoritys-dysfunction-is-actively-harming-ukraine/

Latest on Palestinians

 Generally, we've heard about military-grade attacks on the Palestinian civilians of Gaza (Gaza has been run by Hamas since 2005) as various cutely-named “Operations.” Operation "Summer Rains" in 2006, Operation "Autumn Clouds" that same year, Operation "Hot Winter" in 2008, etc. But the conflict in May 2021 has never received a name. The
difference was that Israel didn’t expect Gaza to decide to join the conflicts going on around Jerusalem.

Sheikh Jarrah had six Palestinian families living in it. According to an Israeli law that we have seen many variations on over the decades since 1948, those families had to pay rent or otherwise acknowledge that Jewish Israelis were entitled to live there owing to the neighborhood having been previously occupied by Jewish families. This would be a
reasonably fair rule, but it's an entirely one-sided rule. Palestinians can't make any similar claims. The Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah refused to make even symbolic concessions. despite the Israeli Supreme Court ruling against them.

In a struggle that was going on at the same time and very close by, Israel was also trying to prevent Palestinians from 1948-occupied areas of Israel to attend a ceremony in the old city of Jerusalem at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hamas of Gaza decided to ally themselves with the residents of Sheikh Jarrah by demanding Israel withdraw from there and from the Temple Mount complex. They launched a barrage of rockets after Israel refused to budge. The one-sided battle (May 10 to 17) resulted in enormous damage to Gaza. Hamas launched 4,360 rockets towards Israel. As the rockets were small and unaimed, 12 Israeli civilians, including two children died.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provide direct relief and works programs for Palestinian refugees, discovered after Israeli bombs hit one of its schools, that Hamas had dug a tunnel underneath the school. The tunnel did not begin or end on the school grounds, but apparently just traveled underneath it. The tunnel was unknown to
civilians, meaning it was dug for military purposes. 

The war cost Gaza over 260 people, including 66 children and 41 women, and exacerbated previous traumas in particular among children. The World Bank estimated that up to US$380 million in physical damage and US$190 million in economic losses were caused.Recovery needs have been estimated up to US$485 million during the first 24 months. They also estimated that Gaza's GDP would contract by 0.3% in 2021 compared to an estimated 2.5% annual growth before the conflict.

Four high-rise building in Gaza City were also destroyed. Israel warned inhabitants just before the strikes, so they had the chance to escape. Allegedly, the buildings were being used for military purposes, but there were several news agencies housed in one of them. One would think that reporters would have kept an eye out for people whose very presence
would be a danger to them. A quick search showed no updates, no Israeli defense of the attacks, meaning no one has provided evidence that any of the buildings contained any legitimate military targets.

A term that has been used for the political post-war time has been “habbet Ayyar” (May outburst). Palestinians inside Israel and Israel-occupied territory since 1948, with residents closing roads, throwing Molotov cocktails and putting up Palestinian flags in place of Israeli
ones. On May 12, Israel declared a state of emergency in Lydd for the first time since 1966 and imposed a curfew on the city as the war on Gaza began to unfold. Over 2,000 Palestinians had been arrested from then until early June. Palestinians were led by regular people within their own communities.

A very serious result of the May conflict was that Congress wanted to send Israel $1 billion for the Iron Dome missile defense system that defends against Palestinian short-range rockets. For the first time ever, members of Congress refused to vote for a shipment of military goods to Israel The vote was very small, but was an ominous first. Currently, the
appropriation isn’t passed yet, Senator Bernie Sanders Is insisting that the Iron Dome appropriation be coupled with humanitarian aid for Palestinians. 

Senator Robert Menendez, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, usually a strong supporter of Israel, says he’s “troubled” by reports of “innocent civilians” suffering at the hands of Israeli forces this past May. He assured Israel that he still supports them, but his statement is unusual and worth noting.

Turning to the question of Israel’s laws that permit Israel to seize properties that used to
belong to Jewish people, but do not permit Palestinians to seize properties that used to belong to Palestinians, we need to ask: “Is it antisemitic to protest such laws?” By protesting such an imbalanced judicial system, are we being insensitive to the Israeli need to survive as a Jewish state that’s surrounded by Arab states?

The NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) B'Tselem says Israel is practicing Apartheid. Human Rights Watch agrees. Both the Jewish Israeli population and the Palestinians who live within the boundaries of both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories number 6.8 million each. If we insist that Israel must give equal right to Palestinians, then
isn’t that asking that Israel no longer be a Jewish state? Would such a demand be antisemitic as we’d be asking Israelis to give up something very precious to them or would it simply be asking for justice? After all, living under Apartheid is something no people would voluntarily do.

The Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman recently noted that progressives hardly ever mention Hamas. She identifies Hamas as a “terrorist” group and had some harsh words for them.

My own view on that is that I don’t think Israel draws any real distinction between Hamas, which runs Gaza, and Fatah, the Palestinian group that runs the West Bank. Both are under tight blockade by Israel, nothing and no one gets in or out without going through an Israeli
military checkpoint. Israel feels no obligation to let anything in that they have not approved. One could make the argument that since we’d like to see Palestinians have more unrestricted commerce with the outside world, that we’d “really” like to see the destruction of Israel and thereby, maybe we’re really just antisemitic. 

Our idea is that we need to draw a distinction between wanting to annihilate the Jewish race, y’know “Drive them into the sea” (that is, being antisemitic) and between being critical of the policies of the state of Israel, that is, criticizing Israel as though it were a regular country.

Democrats vs Republicans, any real difference?

Okay, so I was challenged to come up with a list of differences between the two major parties so as to prove they’re not just one party with two names. Here’s the opposing list of where there’s not much difference between the parties:

War

Brutal sanctions preceded the Iraq War, but Democrats left the actual military invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan up to Bush. Yes, Obama reinforced the Iraq War and then carried out the Bush plan to pull out by the end of 2011. In contrast to Republican charges that came out after Daesh (ISIS) appeared, the Obama Administration tried very hard to remain in Iraq longer, but neither the Iraqi nor the American public wanted any such thing to take place. 

the Democrats' support for NAFTA, TPP
Formally and officially, Hillary Clinton opposes TPP, but a major criticism of NAFTA was that labor and environmental groups were heard from as an after-thought. If Clinton had truly learned from NAFTA criticism, those groups would have been in on the ground floor for TPP.
 
bank deregulation

True, but Dodd-Frank has had a modest effect on restraining “too big to fail” financial institutions. Not a major effect and not right away, but “what is clear is that Dodd-Frank sent notice to banks and other financial institutions that they couldn’t continue with as little scrutiny and oversight as they had in the past.”

welfare "reform"

Yes, a very bad move on Bill Clinton’s part.

social security "reform"

Bill Clinton was planning on major “reform” but thanks to Monica Lewinsky, he wasn’t able to. The Simpson-Bowles “Cat Food Commission” certainly tried to “reform” SS, but Rep. Paul Ryan thought it wasn’t destructive enough and Rep. Jan Schakowsky thought it went too far, so there was no consensus report, just the recommendations of Simpson and Bowles to gut SS. So not really sure what’s meant by that.

NSA spying

Yep, definitely a bipartisan thing.

corporate welfare for the insurance industry - aka Obamacare (originally a right wing thinktank policy first implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney)
Actually, many people have interpreted that as a clever move by Obama. By going as far to the right as was possible and still having a workable system, that left the Republicans with nothing to recommend in its place. The new Governor of Kentucky ran on dismantling the ACA/Obamacare, but found that he had no way to do so without throwing 300,000 citizens off of their health plans and thereby directly causing 300,000 people to become loyal, committed Democrats, so he backed off on that.
Also, the Democrats did have a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, but they had to keep right-wingers like Senator Joe Lieberman and others aboard, so the set-up had to be kept modest. We can’t blame the right-wing Democrats entirely. there’s evidence Obama wanted to blame Lieberman for his dropping the public option and that Lieberman agreed to be the scapegoat, but that Obama was really the one that wanted to drop it. 

bailing out the banks in 2009 but not Main Street

Yeah, Obama wasn’t in office yet, but he signed off on that.

refusal to fight for serious campaign finance reform
Another bipartisan thing.

refusal to tax the rich
Obama raised taxes on the wealthy a bit, but yeah, we could return to the Kennedy-era 70% rate without damaging the economy at all.
 
or cut the military budget
I’m personally disappointed Star Wars/SDI/Missile Defense is still being researched. Complete boondoggle. The A-10 “Warthog” attack plane simply doesn’t need replacing. Nor does the B-52, for that matter. Both planes are extremely well-designed for their function. The F-35 is another complete boondoggle that’s good for putting money into defense contractor pockets  and not much else. From 2011 to 2014, that is, from the pull-out from Iraq to the appearance of Daesh, US military spending went down a few hundred billion (it went back up again), but yes, way too much being spent.
 
refusal to prosecute makers of illegal wars and torture
Again, yup. Obama made a deliberate decision not to prosecute.

So what can we list as being real differences between the two parties?

Legislation. Enacted laws went from 460 during the last term under G.W. Bush, to 385 under a period of Democratic control of both the House and Senate, but also when Republicans got more and more filibuster-happy. Was at 284 and 296, then crashed to 165 (so far as of June 2016) when the GOP took over the Senate. Speaker Paul Ryan, formerly the Republican Budget Director, can’t seem to pass a Budget Resolution that’s, by the way, required by law. There’s no filibuster in the House and Republicans have a solid majority, so Democrats get zero blame for that. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell regards a Trade Promotion Authority bill (One of those bipartisan things listed above) and a bill concerning the Obama Administration deal with Iran as his two biggest accomplishments of the current Senate. Not really sure what the latter bill did as it would have canceled the deal with enough votes, but they didn’t get those votes and it’s not at all clear that the critics of the deal got anything else out of the bill. 

Republicans just don’t seem to like passing legislation as much as Democrats do.

Zika. After sitting around for two months and essentially twiddling their thumbs, the House finally decided to take money out of the response to Ebola and put it into Zika. Problem is, the fight against Ebola isn’t over. Neither Congress nor the Senate has voted on a bill that gives the Administration the full amount it’s requesting. And Congress left town in late May without doing anything to fix the problem. “Dozens of Democrats staged a media event on the steps of Capitol to decry the Republicans who control the House and Senate for leaving for the week-long break with what Democrats argued was so much unfinished business.”  How serious is Zika? Very!

Republicans just don’t seem to like fixing problems.

Abortion. One of the effects of Zika is that it affects babies in the womb, causing them to be born with microcephaly. That is, their brain is much smaller than normal because it hasn’t developed properly. One would think that, being allegedly very, very deeply concerned about babies in the womb, that anti-choicers would be all over this issue. They aren’t. Problem is, Zika and the called-for response contradicts the anti-choicer crusade against Planned Parenthood that was kicked off by a series of highly edited, misleading videotapes released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). Studying fetal tissue could help combat the effects of Zika, but the issue of women who have abortions and then donating fetal tissue is what’s at the heart of the CMP videos. A fourth federal committee was established (a dozen states had already investigated Planned Parenthood and exonerated them in every case) to further investigate Planned Parenthood to “find the truth.” As of June 2016, the committee has turned up zip. 

Conducting ideological crusades appears to take priority over solving real-world problems.

Holding up nominations. The Supreme Court nominee blockade, the blocking of any person nominated by the current president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia is utterly and absolutely unprecedented in American history. Just as an example of the grossly excessive blocking of legitimate nominations, Senator “Tehran” Tom Cotton put a block on “Obama's ambassadorial nominations in order to pressure him to do something about the leaks coming out of the Secret Service. Eventually, that issue was resolved, and Cotton lifted all of the holds except [Cassandra] Butts'. When she met with him to ask why the hold remained on her nomination, Cotton told her "that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president."

Shorter Senator Cotton: “I’m holding up a legitimate appointee because, fuck you, that’s why!”

Priorities.  Senate Majority Leader McConnell was asked about Donald Trump’s racist attack on a judge and responded “I think the Party of Lincoln wants to win the White House.” In other words, yeah, yeah, attacking a judge strictly for his ethnicity is, y’know, maybe not so great, but hey, winning is all that matters!

Winning is more important than maintaining basic decency.


No, I’m sorry, the two parties are not as different as I’d like them to be, but they are indeed different. It does make a difference whether you vote or whether you blow off the voting booth. It does make a difference whether you vote for the Democrats or for a third party.

Missile Defense and NAFTA, Old issues revisited

This has to be the least surprising news I've seen in awhile. Star Wars/ABM/Missile Defense is worthless! Na-a-awwww! Re-e-eally?!?!? Gee, who'd a thunk it? I did a paper on this back in college during the late 1980s, concluding that, yes, "shooting down a bullet with a bullet" can be done, but missile warheads are very small, move very quickly and devices used to detect them are not difficult to fool. Any system for stopping missiles is very easily overwhelmed with lots of real warheads, chaff (clouds of small bits of metal) and decoys. To take just one of the more obvious examples, a multi-stage ballistic missile takes about 30 minutes to get from Russia to the United States. Over 20 of those minutes are spent in space where there's no air friction, where a decoy can be as simple as a balloon coated with metal-based paint. Such a decoy can't be deployed until the real warhead is in space and will quickly burn up on re-entry, but it's pretty much impossible to separate such a decoy from a real warhead when your detection devices are hundreds to thousands of miles away. A single warhead could pop out 20 to 30 decoys, and with small air-sprays, they can all follow different, widely divergent paths. If you want to stop them mid-course, all of the warheads, both the real ones and the fake ones, have to be stopped, or at least a good 80-90% of them. An ABM system will have very little time between the time all the balloons burn away and the warheads impact their targets. A system would have to be extraordinarily fast and capable to deal with the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of remaining warheads. And:

The GMD system, however, is widely considered to be ineffective. Despite the billions of dollars spent, the system has not had a successful intercept test since 2008, with two failures in 2010. A recent report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences found that, “The current GMD system has serious shortcomings, and provides at best a limited, initial defense against a relatively primitive threat.”

In other words, the US spent from the Eisenhower era to the 1972 ABM treaty developing anti-missile defenses, private entrepreneurs continued researching means and methods from 1972, with the government again picking up the tab for research in 1983, whereupon the government has continued to fund research and development ever since. What has the US accomplished in all that time? Doesn't sound like six decades of research has accomplished very much.

What has the impact been on US-Russian relations?

In past years, Russia has opposed the missile shield program. It considers the program to be a serious threat to its national security and disapproves of NATO forces continuing to build military bases in Europe. The US government called Russia’s reaction “unjustified” and defended the program by citing increased threats to Europe from the Caucasus and the Middle East. An important political figure, Alexander Vershbow – NATO’s Deputy Secretary General and former Ambassador to the Russian Federation – stressed at the Moscow Conference that the missile shield program is not meant to be hostile to Russia. He also added the US and NATO respect and take seriously the Russian government’s concerns.

If you have to assure the other party that your weapons system is "not meant to be hostile," your diplomacy has pretty much completely and utterly failed. And sorry, but when the US took Georgia's side against Russia during their 2008 conflict, any thought on Russia's part that the US wasn't hostile was dashed to the ground.

And speaking of old issues, one of the major issues that progressives had with NAFTA and the World Trade Organization back during the Clinton Administration was that the system that they set up was designed to override national sovereignty in favor of corporate interests. Well, a leaked document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations demonstrates that, yes indeed, the newest "free" trade negotiations are again, designed to do precisely that.

Under the agreement currently being advocated by the Obama administration, American corporations would continue to be subject to domestic laws and regulations on the environment, banking and other issues. But foreign corporations operating within the U.S. would be permitted to appeal key American legal or regulatory rulings to an international tribunal. That international tribunal would be granted the power to overrule American law and impose trade sanctions on the United States for failing to abide by its rulings.

The terms run contrary to campaign promises issued by Obama and the Democratic Party during the 2008 campaign.

So, even though Americans have opposed turning over decisions best made by national governments to a body that will privilege corporations over people and even though President Obama promised that he wouldn't take part in any such thing, we're seeing our government again planning to do precisely that. As the blogger says:

This is really important stuff. We’re talking about restricting access to life-saving drugs, and giving up sovereignty over key domestic laws and regulations to foreign multinationals. That would be true for foreign companies in the US and domestic companies in the eight Pacific nations engaged in the trade pact. This is completely in line with the NAFTA consensus, which also allowed corporations the right to sue nations party to certain trade treaties. Private sector lawyers would be the judges on the international tribunals, with clear conflicts of interest, as they advocate for and serve the clients who would be suing the government in this case.

The march of folly continues and decisions that were awful the first time around are no better years later, but they continue to be pursued.

Update: Leaked documents from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreements show that the agreements are even worse than we thought. The agreements blatantly and explicitly favor corporations over national governments. BTW, the piece also documents that the US has paid $300 million to settle similar anti-sovereignty claims that arose from NAFTA.

Review of NR piece on Missile Defense

The Weekly Standard did a piece urging President-Elect Obama not to cancel the Missile Defense project, a project that has cost the US, since the Bush Administration took office, about $60 billion.

Question: How well does the program work at shooting down missiles? "...missile defense assets have scored successes on 35 of 43 hit-to-kill intercepts, or 81.39 percent of the time." Sounds impressive, no? Well, no actually. Back during 2002, the Center for Defense Information recommended a series of steps to ensure that Missile Defense was being constructed to specifications so that it would operate in an effective manner.

In 2004, the Missile Defense Agency clamped down on any ability by scientists to ensure that the MDA designs worked as they were supposed to work. Keep in mind that the Bush Administration is working on an approach that's considerably more complicated than what it inherited from the Clinton Administration.

Is it possible that the MDA pursued its work effectively despite the lack of outside scientific oversight? Not if the Iraq War is anything to go by. It was reported in 2006 that in Iraq, not just millions, but billions of dollars were "burned" through "waste, fraud and war profiteering."

Unfortunately, the extremely high likelihood is that the MDA's impressively high hit-to-kill ratio given above is a complete fraud.

The Weekly Standard piece devotes a considerable number of paragraphs to how much consensus there is over Missile Defense, over how many nations agree to deploy it. The "elephant in the room" in this case is the enormous amount of money that's available to the defense contractors of any nation that gets cut in on the action. If these private businesses are able to get in on a scheme that awards them an enormous amount of money without any effective oversight from the US, that's a pretty good motivation for them to push their government to cooperate. It was pointed out in December 2002 that: "There has, in fact, been little to no assurance that this initial missile defense will be effective," but that "...opposition in Congress remains weak." The reason given is that "large special interest contractors" were driving the process.

Also, the NR piece brings up very scary specters of rogue third-world nations developing nuclear weapons. Former US Secretary of Defense William Perry says:

Given that we are concerned about the missile threat, we must also examine other ways of dealing with it. Throughout the Cold War we faced a much greater nuclear missile threat without a national missile defense. During that period our national security depended upon the effectiveness of our deterrence forces, which are still overwhelmingly powerful. We need to examine the extent to which we are willing to continue to make our national security dependent on deterrence. Is deterrence somehow ineffective against the Third World nations looming as future threats? If so, why, and what can be done to make it more effective?

Proponents of Missile Defense declared back in 1983 that Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the foundational building block for the doctrine of deterrence, was dead. I wasn't convinced of that back in 1983 and I'm not convinced now. Deterrence was built upon the fact, not that the Russians Communists were either Russians or Communists, but that they were human. With the exception of modern-day suicide bombers operating in Iraq and Japanese Kamikaze pilots back in the Pacific during World War II and a few others, people (aw heck, let's just say organisms) generally seek to survive. A nation fires a missile, that missile tends to be pretty easy to track back to where it came from. A single person or small group such as the 9-11 hijackers may be willing to commit suicide, but that tells us very little about how whole nations behave.

Is diplomacy dead? Have the past eight years proven that one cannot make bearable deals with "evildoers"? I actually think the past eight years have proven that President George W. Bush is incompetent at diplomacy, not that diplomacy itself is somehow lacking in effectiveness. Case in point is peace between Palestine and Israel. Bush said back in January 2008 that "...both sides are getting down to the business of negotiating." In early November 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was assuring the world that "Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Has Not Failed," even though "The talks have made little tangible progress."

I was convinced back in the 1980s that Missile Defense was a classic boondoggle, designed far more to take money away from taxpayers and to award it to private contractors, than it was to anything else. The NR piece gives me no reason to change that opinion.

The lowdown on Palin

Now that we've had a few days to analyze and digest the Alaska's Governor Sarah "Maverick Mom" Palin, the left blogosphere has reached a few conclusions. First thing to keep in mind is that she's a likable and popular figure up in Alaska, even to serious, hardcore liberals. So, personal attacks are pretty much out of the question. They're sure to backfire. The above blogger has recommended emphasizing how heartless she is in wanting polar bears to drown just so that she doesn't have to recognize the reality of global warming.
John McCain's "base," the traditional media, is also highly supportive of her.
One of the better takedowns of one of the sillier right-wing talking points is that, no, even though Alaska is host to a Star Wars/ABM/Missile Defense station, Palin as Governor has nothing to do with that. She doesn't receive briefings on it and makes no decisions concerning it. It's a federal facility and she's a state official. The facility does NOT give her "Commander-in-Chief experience."
Fortunately, her reputation as a reformer and as anti-wasteful spending are both completely shot.
Surprise of the day, Richard Cohen has written a good piece on Palin (Cohen has taken a considerable amount of grief from the netroots for many years).
For me and lots and lots of liberals personally, I'm really offended by her anti-science views, both concerning evolution and sexuality and her position as a book-burner but as those are issues that inflame liberals more than they do others, it's best to speak of those with those that one knows are in agreement.
Very, very dangerously, the serious, hard-core right-wing religious "Christianist" folks absolutely LOVE Palin. They think she's just wunnerful.
BTW, Oh, and is it really fair to compare Palin to Dan Quayle? Actually no, as that's pretty unfair to Quayle.

US and Poland ratchet up tension further

In the aftermath of what appears to be a settling of the South Ossetian war between Russia and Georgia, the US and Poland ratcheted up tensions another notch by Poland agreeing to accept a US missile interceptor base on its soil. Back in 1983, the original design for what was then quickly dubbed "Star Wars" (A continuation of the ABM system which had been temporarily forced to proceed as an entirely privatized system running "on spec") was for it to be a series of satellites that would launch small rockets upon detecting a missile launch. As that was rather obviously a system that could very easily be used in an offensive, first-strike role (A rocket fired from the upper atmosphere would be traveling quickly enough to wipe out just about anything without even the need to carry an explosive payload), it was reconfigured to use different means to knock down missiles.

In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that the US integrate its latest iteration of Star Wars, "Missie Defense," with a Russian weapons system, specifically by using their Gabala radar station located in Azerbaijan. The US countered that they could build safeguards into their system so that Russians need not be concerned over it being used against them. Obviously, for the US to have constructed an integrated system would have meant that the two systems could not have been un-integrated in a hurry. Looking at it from the Russian perspective, they clearly would have felt much calmer and more relaxed had their proposal been accepted.

The Russians have made it quite clear that they interpret the Polish acceptance of a Missile Defense system as a hostile move aimed at them. Apparently, America's neoconservatives have been trying to encircle Russia since at least the administration of the Elder George Bush. Of course, as US military assets are pretty thoroughly tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's not at all clear that the US has any serious response available should Russia demonstrate its displeasure through more energetic means.

Response to Rick Santorum's proposal to spark revolution in Iran

I attended college in Washington DC from 1978 to 1982, the last two years of the Carter Administration and the first two years of the Reagan Administration. I was absolutely appalled to hear members of the Reagan Administration blaming the troubles in Central America (El Salvador's 12-year civil war began in 1979, as did the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua) on "outside agitators," as though one could simply create revolutions at will wherever they were tactically necessary. One item that was made quite clear by books like Washington's War on Nicaragua and David and Goliath was that the sparsely-populated NorthEast of Nicaragua was an area where the Contras could operate pretty much at will, but in the heavily-populated SouthWest area, they were a negligible presence.
Well, just as with the ABM/Star Wars/Missile Defense/etc program, bad ideas never really die, they just hibernate for awhile and then rise yet again from the dead. So I was appalled, but not particularly surprised, to see Rick Santorum produce pretty much the same "We can gin up revolutions wherever and whenever we please" idea resurrected yet again in the pages of the Inky. A buddy of mine sent the Inky a good letter and I sent them the following:

Rick Santorum describes Iran as being an extremely important component of the two armed political parties Hezbollah and Hamas. He also states that "support for pro-democracy groups can be effective" in forcing Iran to adopt policies it currently resists.

I would notice that the US has tried and failed miserably to create indigenous resistance movements in other countries. Back during the 1960s, the US failed so miserably to create an indigenous resistance movement in North Vietnam that the effort was abandoned long before the US lost South Vietnam. During the 1980s, the indigenous resistance movement created for Nicaragua did so poorly that the Contras would have been completely ineffective had it not been for other policy tools (Primarily trade sanctions) being used in concert with them. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was no indigenous resistance movement to help US troops conquer the country, there was no "Fifth Column" to work behind enemy lines, despite the fact that US agencies had over a decade to create one.

Is Iran just smarter than the US at doing this sort of thing? My suspicion is that they're not. My suspicion instead, is that Hezbollah and Hamas serve genuine political needs within their home countries. After all, they were both successful at electoral politics there. If the US succeeds in "cutting off the head" (i.e., invading and occupying Iran), will Hezbollah and Hamas shrivel up and die? They might be weakened by the loss of Iran, but I seriously doubt their influence would end.

Santorum declares, not that Iran is a serious threat in its own right, but that "a nuclear-armed Iran would be our greatest national security challenge since the end of the Cold War." In other words, it's a comparative threat, not a threat per se. Personally, I consider Global Warming to be a vastly greater threat than Iran, but Santorum is speaking specifically of "national security" challenges.

Let's not "Put aside politics to confront Iran," let's instead see if we can work out some sort of workable solution for us all. We've had quite enough of the US showing its fangs and rattling its sabre. Those policies have gone nowhere. It's time for more serious and more sensible policies.