All Posts Tagged With: "Rock"

Sensing Weakness Putin Acts; Timid Recoil; U. S. Faces Threat, and Sides Are Being Picked

On a day when Russia is threatening a harsh response, beyond the diplomatic, to the placement of U. S. anti-missile radar and missiles Paul M. Weyrich Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation blames, if obliquely, cold warriors including George H. W. Bush for the wreckage in Georgia. His thesis is Russia should have been invited into NATO after the former USSR collapse and that would have prevented such aggression.

 As unlikely as such deterrence seems; Weyrich’s contention is that had his advise and that of Edward (Ed) Lozansky, president of the American University, in Moscow, William S. (Bill) Lind, and Russian Parliamentarian Arkady Murashev been followed Russia’s paranoia would have been satisfied and such border wars avoided. Weyrich says that Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected president of Russia said he was open to the idea. That maybe true but the conditions mot think including NATO members would be onerous.

President George H. W. Bush’s advisers were absolutely against this idea. If he had had the foresight to disregard their counsel and push for our idea how different history very probably would be today.

Weyrich recalls visiting with Bush in the Oval Office after Dr. Robert (Bob) Krieble and I returned from Moscow, where we had found that Mikhail Gorbachev, the political rage at the time over here, was not popular in Russia. Yeltsin was much more popular. He says he told Bush if Gorbachev were replaced, his replacement could be someone more to our liking but H. W. Bush said he feared a replacement would be a Stalinist.

At that time Russia was in turmoil. It was broke. The old Soviet system was struggling to somehow stay relevant; Russia had been exposed as a paper tiger unprepared for conventional conflict but armed to the nuclear teeth, and in any case hindsight is while precise-moot. Plus former Soviet satellites had turned to the West as savior and barely scabbed over from decades of Soviet brutality and repression, and were loath to let the recently caged Bear loose into their bailiwicks.

“Is it now impossible for us to start over? Must Russia be our enemy? If it were, would we be prepared to fight another war? I don’t have the answers but it seems to me we must begin to think outside the box. Surely we must have new advisers with new thinking. The alternative is to risk sinking into the abyss of a new war with Russia. Do we need this? “asks Weyrich. Answering ,”No.”

Unfortunately Weyrich skips the key point that the U. S. and its allies need not be Russia’s enemy for it to be ours. So much so that I detect a surging optimism on the extreme left that it maybe time to reconnect with Russian cash to resurrect the American Progressive Party aka., Communist Party USA, or likely by another name and a willingness in some dachas outside Moscow to try it because they have the cash to do it.