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Content for January 2009

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Opinion & Analysis

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by Tim Inwood January 9, 2009

Surrounded by Danger But Most Oblivious to It

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I am hiking along with a liberal. He has sadly insisted on taking point and is now blindly blazing the trail while prattling on about his plans for the future. He has refused to use my machete as he fears hurting the plants and or any endangered animals we may encounter, so he employs a worthless Nerf bat, with the foliage falling back in our faces blinding us. We are thus clueless as to where he is leading us, but we trudge along anyway. I am rolling my eyes as the liberal is saying some truly stupid things, nothing new. Suddenly I hear a rattling noise. I freeze as I realize this dim-bulb has marched us straight into a nest of venomous snakes. An actual event? No, a nightmare I recently had one night.

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After I woke, the dream made sense to me. We Americans are indeed living in a world where we are surrounded by dangerous adversaries, akin to venomous snakes. They have coiled up and are waiting until after January 20th, when the guy willing to use the machete is not in the lead, and the fool with the Nerf bat is. I fear it is inevitable that one, some, or all, will strike at America sometime after that date.

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I look to the Far East and I see China. The People’s Republic of China has for some time pretended to be a friend. It has been anything but that. Their military has been gearing up for a confrontation with the US for a couple of decades. They have been making satellite-killing missiles to take out global communications, as well as building a huge stockpile of amphibious landing vehicles. Since 1949, it has stuck in Communist China’s craw that the Chinese who escaped their grasp set up their own regime on the Island of Formosa. Taiwan is the jewel they might just risk all for. There is no other reason to build the landing vehicles, except to take Taiwan back. The problem for China is the United States. Taiwan is protected by a treaty with the US, so the PRC has been waiting, waiting for the day the United States elected a President who would possibly not honor that treaty with Taiwan, should China attack. China is scrutinizing Barack Obama, and they may just think they have found their man.  We must watch this snake closely along with the tiny viper who slinks along next to him like a parasite: North Korea. We can count on the pot-bellied dictator of that country doing the bidding of China. West of them, but still to our east, I see the next snake.

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Russia has been masquerading as a harmless garter snake since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in reality he is as dangerous as the tiny coral snakes we have in our southern states. In recent years, China and Russia have stepped up military cooperation, clearly aimed at the US. The United States has tried to appear non-threatening to Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Bear. We sent aid and did what we could to help the fledgling republic that arose from the rubble after the rotted timbers of communism collapsed. We had high hopes for them, and had we or NATO been a threat to them, with nefarious intentions, there was no better time to act than when the frequently drunk Boris Yeltsin was in power. But it is not in our nature. Sadly such aggression is in the nature of the Russians; it is how they got their empire in Czarist days and nothing changed in their thinking after 1917.  Unfortunately Yeltsin was replaced by something more sinister, a former KGB agent. Despite what President Bush said about looking into Putin’s eyes and seeing his soul, I can personally tell you KGB agents have no souls. Thus it is true of Vladimir Putin. His tenure was a period of growing hostility towards the US, while consolidating power for himself. He had to step down as president due to pesky constitutional limitations, but installed himself as prime minister with his flunky Dmitry Medvedev taking over the presidential post. There is little doubt in the West as to who really is in control. In recent years the high price of oil made Russia fairly wealthy and they suddenly went from third world status to quite rich. Moscow currently has more billionaires living amongst the onion spire domes of Russian Orthodox Churches than any other city in the world. This newfound oil wealth was rapidly used to build up a revitalized Russian military machine. In 2008 the Russians flexed their muscles and tested that new army in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. They trumped up some rubbish about the poor minority Russian ethnic population being treated badly in South Ossetia and invaded. Had it not been for the United States and NATO, they would have stayed. The misadventure in Georgia showed the nature of Russia has not really changed since the Soviet days, so charmingly if simplistically laid out in Victor Varshi’s marvelous animated book “Red Primer” (http://www.mega.nu/ampp/vashi_red_primer/forward.htm), a little book put out on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet revolution to help children and diplomats understand the Soviet Bear a bit better. It should be required reading at Foggy Bottom.

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The Russians also pine for the Ukraine. The Ukraine was hard for them to lose, as it was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. However Ukraine has no such longing to return to Russian control. Millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin to “thin the herd” of this nation of independent thinkers. The Russians have never lost interest in meddling in Ukraine’s affairs. In 2004 Presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko fell ill. It was learned he had been poisoned with a dioxin that clearly came from Russia. The Russians, of course, claimed complete innocence in the matter. In fact, their behavior in this case was typical of the way the Soviets behaved when caught with bloody hands, an all too common event in the Twentieth Century. There was concern that the Russians would invade Ukraine during the Georgian fiasco; luckily it did not come to pass, but we are sure the Russians weighed the possibilities of what they could get away with. Having to withdraw from Georgia no doubt stung their pride. They will be back and to make sure we are more distracted they have begun to play again in our back yard. Earlier this year Russia sold MIG fighters and sent technical advisors and tooling to build a Kalashnikov factory in Venezuela. This was followed by visits by warships to Venezuela and also to Russia’s oldest pal in the Caribbean, the Castro brothers Fidel and Raul in Cuba.

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Which now turns our attention to the snakes to our south. Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

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Nicaragua you say? Yes indeed. You see, the nasty little communist dictator of Nicaragua is back and Danny Ortega has already made one trip back to visit his old friends in Russia to see what he might get from them this time around. Had the swine been killed twenty years ago and the Sandinistas swept away, this would not be an issue. But our idiot Democrat friends in Congress saw to it that Reagan and the Contras did not permanently harm these quaint Central American Communists. From Nicaragua military supplies flowed to communist guerillas in El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia. They were quite the headache for the US in the 80’s, and they may well be again. The Russians do not appear to be interested in spreading communism anymore, but spreading headaches for the US is in their interests. So expect it.

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Cuba is an economic basket case who is this month celebrating 50 years of poverty, starvation and depredation under the iron fisted rule of Fidel Castro. Sure, things have gotten better under Raul, they now have microwave ovens to cook their crushed egg shell dinner in. It is a pity the Castro brothers have outlived the Bush Presidency; had they been gone we could have perhaps seen a free and prosperous Cuba return. I fear the Russians may help subsidize the current group of old geriatric communists so they can get a military foothold off our coast again.

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Venezuela is another matter. Hugo Chavez is relatively young at 54, and views himself as the successor to Fidel Castro in the region. You would think one trip to the crumbling city that is Havana would awaken anyone to the disaster Castro has brought to what was once an island paradise, but Hugo is something of a dullard. He has used the oil wealth of his country poorly. Nationalizing the oil industry has been a fiasco with production dropping rapidly. He built, with Russian assistance, a Kalashnikov factory, which he says he needs for the defense of Venezuela. I am willing to bet money that Venezuelan-made Kalashnikov Avtomat rifles will begin turning up in the hands of communist insurgents all over South and Central America within the next few years. The economy of his country is already showing signs of foundering, and with his friendship with Bolivian President Evo Morales, I expect to see them meddling in their neighbors affairs to take attention off the damage there are doing to their own countries. Luckily oil prices have fallen and this will hopefully curtail Russian mischief with the Marxists to our south, but don’t count on it.

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The next snake to draw my attention turns out to be a vast nest of many serpents, entangled with one another. It covers a huge region and they are numerous. The Middle East is infested with serpents: Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and their primary patrons, Syria and Iran, are to be watched carefully, especially since both have nuclear ambitions. The other country of interest is Pakistan. This country is a political basket case with no control over her north and northwestern border region. They can’t control Waziristan, yet it’s a great national insult to tolerate anyone else going in on what is technically their soil. Coups, plots, assassinations play major roles in their politics. More hazardous is they are a nuclear power, with weapons that can strike their neighbors. This is of great concern to India. Until we deal with these nests we will not fix the problems we have in Iraq or Afghanistan. In other words, much like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I see no satisfactory resolution to these issues in the near future.

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There are threats elsewhere, and I don’t wish to become bogged down in them all. Too much minutiae involved. The point I wished to make is we live in dangerous world. Many of our fellow Americans seem oblivious to it. Some nations are only held in check by the threat that we will strike back if provoked or attacked.  Sadly my friends, we are, as of January 20th, stuck behind a fellow who thinks he can blaze a trail into a dangerous world with a Nerf bat. His own vice president has warned that we will likely face some crisis, and that we will perceive Obama has not done the right thing. This worries me greatly. Many in Europe celebrated the election of Obama, because they hate a strong America and view Obama as weak.

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Obama’s own comments, that his intent is to downgrade the importance of our military if not outright weaken it, have not helped. His talk of a domestic force equal to the standing military is very concerning if not outright frightening. His intent to eliminating testing and development of new weapon systems, at a time our adversaries are on a rapid military build up bothers me greatly. This is the sort of action that will encourage our enemies and beget aggression against us. We saw this before in the Clinton years. We ignored the danger and we paid heavily on September 11, 2001 for that inattentiveness. The appointment of Leon Panetta to be the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is also folly. This Clinton re-tread, bean counter is not qualified to run CIA, especially in time of war. Obama has caved into the left with this appointment and it magnifies the peril we are in.

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My friends, I wish I could offer a satisfactory solution to the concerns I have just brought before you. Sadly that would involve inventing a time machine and somehow reversing the results of Election Day, something beyond my powers. The only thing I can offer is this.  We conservatives may no longer be in control of the White House or either House of Congress, but we still have a voice. It is our duty to do what we can to inform these delusional liberals of the dangers we face, as we face them together. We are indeed surrounded by enemies who are eager to strike and destroy us. It is up to all of us to work together to keep them in check and if attacked, defeat them. I have no illusions but that over the next four years we will have to make Obama and the Democrats appear to have a spine, though we know they do not.  As citizens of this country, it is our duty to stay informed and aware of the dangers about us, and keep the pressure on Washington to do what must be done to defend us. We must also draw the attention of our less attentive fellow citizens, by talking to them, by writing editorial letters and getting our voice in the media.

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Showing weakness to the parts of the world hostile to us is going to spawn belligerence from those loathing us like you will not believe, and for that we will all pay dearly. It must be made clear to the entire world that if struck, we will not lay back and take it. Now we need to make it clear to the incoming Congress and president that they must articulate it. God help us.