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Hi Cal.

Hey, check this out...

"Russia plans big nuclear exercise
Nearly all bombers would take flight to simulate attack

The Associated Press
Updated: 2:23 p.m. ET Jan. 30, 2004MOSCOW - Russian nuclear forces are preparing for a massive exercise that would be their largest in more than 20 years, a newspaper reported Friday.

The one-day maneuvers, which were set for next month, would involve test-firing several ballistic missiles and taking almost the entire fleet of Russia’s strategic bombers into the air in a simulation of a nuclear conflict, according to the business newspaper Kommersant.

Official comments on the exercise have been sketchy. The chief of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, Col.-Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, was quoted Thursday by the Interfax-Military News Agency as saying the exercise would involve several launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles in various regions of Russia, but he gave no further details.

Kommersant said the maneuvers would be the largest since a 1982 exercise of Soviet nuclear forces, which the West dubbed the “seven-hour nuclear war.”

Cruise missiles, bombers over Arctic
In the new exercise, Russian Tu-160 bombers are set to test-fire cruise missiles over the northern Atlantic, and other strategic bombers are to conduct flights over Russia’s Arctic regions and test-fire missiles at a southern range near the Caspian Sea, the newspaper said.

In addition, Russia’s strategic forces are scheduled to launch military satellites from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and the Plesetsk launch pad in northern Russia, Kommersant reported.

A system warning of an enemy missile attack and a missile defense system protecting Moscow would also be involved in the exercise, which President Vladimir Putin is set to attend, the newspaper said.

Putin has tried to revive Russia’s military might, eroded by post-Soviet funding shortages, and the ambitious exercises are certain to further bolster his popularity in the run-up to the March 14 presidential election, which he is expected to win in a landslide. Kommersant acerbically dubbed the exercises “pre-election maneuvers.”

It said Moscow had warned Washington about the exercises, describing them as part of efforts to fend off terror threats"

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4111938/

This bears repeating:

"Moscow had warned Washington about the exercises, describing them as part of efforts to fend off terror threats."

?????????

ah, yeah, right. You fend off stateless international terrorists by launching an all-out full-scale nuclear holocaust against this United States (and perhaps Israel)????

That is the most assinine and ludicrous sentence I have ever read in my entire life, bar none.

Where is my tin foil beanie!!!

I hope this doesn't come across as too arrogant, combative or sarcastic. I do not profess to have all the answers and the complexity of the world situation at the moment would inspire humility in me if nothing else would.

I have been a lurker, but a stomach bug has laid me up and the detour the thread has taken has forced me to become a poster . . .

Qaeda is *not* a Russian proxy. Others may be using it as a proxy. But Russia? No.

Russia is a complicated subject and does not lend itself to a simplified analysis.
Russia, like China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran - - (and for that matter Germany and France) - - have national policies which can be inimical to the US, but are also many times (if not most of the time) policies in self-contradiction and even (sometimes) outright alignment with US objectives.

Some of these nations (and others like them) play both sides of the fence in this global "war on terror". Some have different factions in their government with one faction seeking reform, modernity, and good relations with the US while another faction may even seek to harm the US. And yes, some may be duplicitous and seek to harm us while on the surface engaging in limited cooperation. Some even make this duplicity into an art form by using factional disagreements as a "good cop-bad cop" cover to mask strategic objectives that would harm the US.

But this is the most dangerous time in modern US history. Our forces are in the midst of the largest logistical maneuver since WWII, while the world is as unstable as it has been since the outbreak of the Second World War:

Korean crisis as negotiations soon deadlock and threat of nuclear sale to AQ

Taiwan Straits crisis intensifying as the election approaches and China will react

Pakistani nukes insecure w/ ISI ties to Islamists and AQ targeting Musharaff

Saudi vulnerability to destabilization as AQ seeks a new "host organism"

Iran most unstable since founding of the Islamic Republic while closing in on nukes

Palestinian "Authority" in total collapse and chaos looming in the territories

Israel imposing a unilateral solution to the Palestinian issue will ignite Arab world

Syria hosting (or allowing transit and basing) for terrorists and harboring WMD

Lebanese-Israeli border a tinderbox with thousands of Hezbollah short-range missiles

One terrorist "mega-attack" against Israel could send the region into unimaginable war

Ten rapidly emerging scenarios to ponder . . . and if you were the President of Russia (look at a globe for a minute and see which one of us is closer to the "action" in each scenario) how would you react? Their military has been incapable of defeating a terrorist insurgency in their own borders after a decade. They are in a weakened and vulnerable state (but recovering from where they were a few years ago). This is a warning shot. And it is not really meant for us. The message is "Don't mess with us".

Russia may be a danger if it cannot continue a stable path of political and economic transition and development. But if you put our worst enemies on earth on one end of the spectrum and our best friends on the other, Russia is closer to the latter than the former (though admittedly not by much). That can continue to change for the better if we meet our common challenges together. Think about it, with the exception of Israel (which finds itself in the same position), there is not a single country on this planet whose population supports the United States in the "war on terror" or its strategic objectives - - not one. I say that as someone who supports US policy, but we would be naive to believe that our strategy is not "high-risk". I would be happy to be proven wrong on this, but you will not find a majority of Brits, Spaniards, any Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, Indians, etc whose *people* support the "war on terror". There is not a nation on earth (besides Israel) where this is so. Their *governments* may support us, but the people are far more dubious. That is fine. The governments understand the nature of the threat far better than do their people. And our national survival is not up for an international vote. But the point is that Russia is not really all that much more "anti-American" than anyone else these days. So things should be kept in perspective.

Anyway, Putin has an election in a few weeks and maybe he needs to protect his nationalist flank from a supernationalist challenge if it goes to a runoff (which he is in no danger of losing, but in the expectations game, if he does not win big, he loses). So don't be surprised if as the Russian government goes before the Russian people in elections they adopt the anti-American tone of the people.

And if what people speculate upon in this thread were to come to pass (an AQ-executed WMD attack on the US), you really should think it through. AQ could be a proxy for someone, but the most likely candidates do not include Russia. However, the main suspects are all on its periphery. We would retaliate. Russia has good reason to be nervous, not because they are guilty, but because they will definitely get caught up in the aftermath (or even the crossfire) and want to signal all parties that while they cannot properly maintain their military, their missiles work just fine thank you very much.

Also, I am no historian, but most of the conspiracy theories on Russia and perestroika being an elaborate "maskirovka" (strategic deception campaign) are based on KGB and GRU defectors who left Russia a decade ago, and cite as their primary reference a book written 20 years ago by a KGB major (Golitsyn) who defected over 40 years ago (during the Kennedy administration) who, besides providing valuable information also provided extremely misguided and damaging analysis (some think he may have even been a double agent as were several of the "defectors" of the early 1960s). And if he was genuine, his analysis was often not reliable and helped spark James Angleton's witchhunt that caused incalculable damage to our country.

To put it more simply, Golitsyn was the Soviet "EOM" from 1961. And accepting his strategic analysis in the 1960s would have extended, not shortened, the Cold War.

And relying on his contorted analysis 40 years later would be even more misguided than it would have been in the 1960s. If we had listened to Golitsyn, we would never had recognized the Sino-Soviet split for what it was (Golitsyn said that was a ruse too). Nixon might have never gone to China. Brezhnev might never have been forced into detente and strategic arms talks. We never would have had the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate breathing space we desperately needed at a time of internal dissension and strategic inertia. We bought three decades of peace with China and a strategic alliance with them against the Soviets.

Now the tables have turned. And those who fail to learn from the successes of history, may be doomed *not* to repeat them.

You should not be alarmed by Russia (at least for now).
You should be alarmed as to the reason Russia is alarmed.

The darkest days in American history may yet await us.

The last thing we need to be doing is misidentifying the few potential friends we actually have at the moment.

Back to the point, al Qaeda is a proxy, and may even be a proxy for a proxy (lest anyone accuse me of insufficient paranoia).

But Russia is a tangential issue and it is exquisitely unsettling that just days after an aborted (or preempted) WMD attack on the US (canceled flights) and actual Ricin attacks (though debatably WMD), a sometimes interesting thread that while not always accurate was very topical has lurched into a ditch.

We have bigger fish to fry than decades-old Russian conspiracy theories.
Russian nuclear exercises are a symptom, not the disease.

And the fact that it is just a symptom should alarm you to no end.

If this is not political, what exactly has the Russians so scared that they are rattling their sabres so hard?

Anyway, I'd been saving my two cents for a few thousand posts at least. Sorry to dump the whole piggy bank on everyone at once, but if we are going to make Russia the boogey-man and the bane of our existence, then at least give Iran, North Korea, and China equal time.