#6590 #6591
#12 - JRL 6589
excerpt
Antiwar.com
December 4, 2002
TO RUSSIA, WITH LOVE
By Justin Raimondo
Putin wants a new Russian empire? Let him have Iraq Uh-Oh …. Don't look now, but last week President Vladimir Putin had the bright idea of bringing back the five-pointed red star as the insignia of the Russian military. It all begins to make sense if we note the Russian government's crackdown on … Barbie! The Guardian is on the story:
"The Russian Ministry of Education has included Barbie along with a list of other toys and games, such as Pokémon, that face a ban because of the supposedly harmful effects they have on the minds of young children. Barbie, in particular, is under fire because the doll is thought to awaken sexual impulses in the minds of the very young, and encourage consumerism among Russian infants."
The Russian economy could do with a little "consumerism," the problem being that there still isn't much to consume. Of course I don't suppose they've banned J. C. Penney's "Forward Command Post," a model of what looks to be an ordinary American-style middle class home with the roof blown off and the walls pockmarked with bullet holes. It's a bizarre post-9/11 twist on what looks like Barbie's dollhouse, that comes with action figures – but no corpses. At $44.95, this ghoulish construction, besides being far too expensive for the average Russian family to afford, couldn't possibly have any ill effects on those little Russkie tykes – not when they're weaning them to wage genocidal wars, like the one in Chechnya. As the Guardian reports:
"The move will be seen as part of the Kremlin's attempts to control the sense of identity of young Russians. Russian President Vladimir Putin is keen to foster ideals of family and patriotism alongside the belief that Russia was, and can be again, a great imperial power."
An imperial power that is slowly imploding in on itself, demographically as well as economically? Not too likely. Forget those dreams of past glory, Vladimir, and start handing out Viagra as generously as your predecessors once ladled out the vodka.
Speaking of being stoned out of one's mind, a recent article in Pravda, reprinted in WorldNetDaily, claims that the Russians may be planning their own coup attempt in Iraq in order to prevent the Americans from grabbing all the oil contracts:
"What if Russia were to deploy troops to Baghdad in its own coup attempt? In the words of a Pravda analyst, 'This no longer seems to be the idea of a lunatic. … It could provoke a crisis that the CIA and the U.S. State Department analysts did not even think of. Then, it will be the time for a different kind of world order, taking into consideration everybody's interests.'"
The Russians want to take Iraq, when they can't even hold on to Chechnya? I say go for it. Better them, than us.
Let them spend $9 billion a month to subdue, police, and hold the country together: let them take the casualties, and bear the burden of empire. They can pay the political costs, too, including the degeneration of their own precarious democracy into a full-fledged neo-totalitarian state.
In any case, the Russians needn't go out of their way to cut us off at the Iraqi pass, because it looks like the invasion that once seemed "inevitable," according to the conventional wisdom, has been called off, at least for the time being. And us peaceniks have none other than uber-hawk Paul Wolfowitz to thank for the good news. In a speech to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Wolfowitz laid out the new administration line on Iraq:
"President Bush is making every effort to bring about the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction without the use of force."
The Bushies have come a long way since the days when the only goal they would recognize or acknowledge was "regime change." Naturally this concession was quickly followed by an admonition to hope for peace but prepare for war:
"Our only hope ... of achieving the peaceful outcome is if we can confront the Iraqi regime with a credible threat of force behind our diplomacy."
Give us the power to strike, the U.S. is saying to its erstwhile European allies, because we won't necessarily use it. Trust us.
Coming from Wolfowitz, the author of an infamous memorandum on why the U.S. must pursue a policy of hegemony on every continent, this is good for a guffaw, or perhaps just a light chuckle, but there is a note of sincerity here, too. What is striking is the admission that a unilateral attack by the U.S. would lack credibility, and this is certainly correct – which is what critics of the war have been saying all along....
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