Here We Go Again
The more we experience, the smarter we're supposed to become. We're the apotheosis of the learning animal, after all. Haven't we presented ourselves as a race closer to the angels than the apes? Don't we seek to emulate the Almighty while deferring to him one one breath and running rampant through the commandments he is said to have demanded we respect:Little civilities like honouring one another, abstaining from the emotional sins that linger deep within our personas that enable us to kill each other with impunity, turn the world upside down in our cataclysmic murderous rages we call war. Each devastating world war in modern history was proclaimed to be the last.
Mankind had learned its lesson. Finally. You'd think that a reading course on ancient history would have instructed us sufficiently so we could sidestep repeating those murderous impulses, those tired old mea culpas. We're incorrigible. The sad thing is it's not just the lunatic fringe that brings countries to war with one another. It's also those countries which boast statesmen.
We're headed back into that tired old Cold War pattern. While we're yet beset with the vision of nuclear armageddon coming at us from the sidelines where rogue states and international terrorists can avail themselves of the ultimate technologies of destruction. Here's another diversion.
Wisdom would have it that the sober statesmen representing highly respected countries would bring themselves together in a common purpose of establishing a prescription for peace. It never happens. We're not peace-prescriptive by nature. We're not catastrophe-averse either. We walk into these dark scenarios where no one and no state, no continent can survive intact, with wide open eyes.
We go through cycles of hope and despair; huge populations dragged hopelessly kicking and screaming, demanding better of those who make these decisions of ultimatum and offence in our names. And it's for nothing. We have our great powers who think nothing of shoving around all those other aspiring little powers, bristling with the insult of their incapabilities.
We have these disparate duos like Kennedy and Kruschev, Reagan and Gorbachov, all with their worldly faults, but somehow managing to overcome the worst that their incautious designs can expose us to. We live in desperate times alternating with decades of somnolence, sleep-walking into the next crisis. Because the world spawns the like of Putin and Bush.
All that fear and tension generated by the Cold War was sorely missed. The excitement gone out of existence. It should, therefore, be recalled. And George Bush in his great and good wisdom has made the first step by tweaking Vladimir Putin's geographic nose. What are American missiles doing in eastern Europe?
President Putin heard the reasons and he's not buying.
Why should he? He enjoys a challenge just like any other old cold-war warrior, champing at the bit to revisit history. So there's his bid on the table. Russia's existing Topol-M missiles are already capable of penetrating the proposed defence shield and he insists that the perceived threat of the U.S. east-Europe placed intercontinental missiles warrant a boosting of his country's strategic offensive capabilities.
"We are not going to stop there" he said. "We will develop new generation systems, which will be immune to the anti-missile defence systems currently being planned. They will be simply powerless." Russia is in the process of developing a new type of missile, one that will have the capability of adjusting altitude and course as it travels - to strike targets within the United States.
Check. And checkmate. Bloody damn.
Labels: World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, February 02, 2007
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