Posted on 02/04/2009 12:26:26 PM PST by nickcarraway
Russia has embarked on a risky political game with new U.S. President Barack Obama by forcing its ally Kyrgyzstan to close a U.S. military base while keeping up overtures to establish warmer relations with Washington.
The Manas air base near the capital of the Central Asian state is a key supply centre for U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, a campaign that Obama has set as a key priority.
Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev standing alongside Russia's Dmitry Medvedev at a news conference in Moscow, said on Tuesday he would close the base after securing a vital rescue package of over $2 billion from Russia.
The surprise move came in the middle of Medvedev's overtures to Obama aimed at raising bilateral ties from post-Cold War lows where they have languished since the days of former U.S. President George W. Bush.
"One could not have chosen a worst moment for such move," Alexei Malashenko of Carnegies Endowment for Peace think tank said.
Russian officials have said they received positive signals from Washington on key points of disagreement -- U.S. plans to station parts of a missile defence system in Eastern Europe and the issue of NATO membership for ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia.
Russian pressure on Kyrgyzstan to close Manas sits oddly since analysts have seen the NATO effort to defeat the Taliban as one of the few areas in which the interests of Washington and Moscow largely coincide.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.reuters.com ...
What’s so risky? Obama will role. He’s already offered Russia an affordable nuclear parity (or superiority) without even negotiating anything.
Russia is the source and enabler of islamic jihad the world over.
The Russians are sticking it to Obama, and he’s too f-in stupid to even realize it.
He cannot hope to even begin to pacify Afghanistan without this base, ESPECIALLY with the Taliban now attacking convoys in Pakistan.
Which opens the door for RUSSIAN INFLUENCE in this region.
He’s been out-chessed...
He couldn’t win at pinochle.
Obama. Look.
All they really want are some vowels.
You have three in your last name alone, you selfish bastid.
Why don’t you give them the vowels in your last name?
Henceforth, you can be “Barry Hussein BM” (which seems appropriate), and they can be “Koyragyzastan”.
Now that’s diplomacy, eh?
You’re welcome. No charge to you, Mr. BM... I’m doin’ it for my country.
ugh!!
The Russkies know that Mr. Obama is a pussy. They’re taking advantage of it. End of story...this time.
It figures....this would NOT have happened under Mr. Ronny Ray-Gun!(May He Rest in Peace, my favorite President). I get the strangest feeling that I’m going to get called back from retirement in the Fleet Reserves very soon because of what this Idiot is doing.
And it’s not even 30 days into the Presidency, for crying out loud!
You only play a ‘tricky game’ if your opponent has the stones to call you. Russia’s doesn’t.
“The Russkies know that Mr. Obama is a pussy. They’re taking advantage of it. End of story...this time.”
Watch Zero give them a piece of the “stimulus package” to placate them.
Where ever you stand on the issues. Our genius diplomats have screwed up any chance we had to have Russia be non-hostile.
When they were fighting Osama’s guys and other Muslims in Chechnya, we took the side of Islam.
Serbia has been a close Russian ally for centuries. When they asked for a centuries old Serb province, Kosovo, not to be split away. We bombed Belgrade. The USA allied itself with the Drug and Human sex slave trafficking, islamic KLA.
When Georgia attacked S. Ossetia where Russian troops were located, and had been since the days of Thomas Jefferson, we worked to humilate them.
When the warsaw pact disbanded, we expanded
NATO right up to their border.
And all along, we really needed was the use of that former Soviet Air force base in Kyrgystan. Russia let us have free use of that base after 9-11.
The part that amazes me, is that i think our state dept took the positions they did vis-a-vis Russia, and never even thought about how they might retaliate diplomatically. An honest person can disagree about whether we should have taken the actions we did in Kosovo,,NATO,,,etc.
But still, no matter how you see those issues, our diplomats have been at best, very amateurish naive negotiators, not to see that they might pull the rig on a vital base to our efforts in Afghanistan.
I'd say they called us in Georgia. What could they do if the called our hand in Central Asia?
And those things were done with Bush people running the show. The utterly incompetent amateur, Obama, is utterly raw meat to resurgent Russian nationalist moves.
Obama is a true disaster for this country.
You forgot the calculated insult of the Jackson-Vanik amendment. That has been a pretty big sore spot too. Come to think of it, since Tom Lantos is dead now I wonder what’s preventing the repeal of JV.
It’s only politically risky if there’s a plausible chance that the U.S. will take the Russians to the woodshed over this. Not going to happen with Zero running the show so I suspect the Russians figure it’s a chance to stick their thumb in our eye with little or no consequence. And this is just the beginning.
We will be lucky indeed if we get through the next four years without fatalities.
Not familiar with that, but i’ll look it up. Thank you. And all please understand, it’s just an interesting topic to me. In no way am i justifying Russia or its actions. Its more that im mystified at our uncoordinated and chaotic diplomatic efforts there. And also always let down with how much we support any islamic movement almost anywhere.
Russia will never be a friend of ours in the sense that they will put our interests as important as theirs. But when they were at war with islam, and suffering huge islamic terror attacks, i think a good diplomat could have played that into something based upon a common enemy.
They lost all those people at the theater, at Beslan, the two airliners blown up,, etc.
Amazing that we turned a people with that kind of natural anti-islamic animus against us.
You make some good points. I couldn’t make sense of our position regarding Serbia.
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