The Third U.S. Cold War with the Russians

(Revised 11-11-2008)

Most Americans think that there was only one "Cold War" with Russia, and that it’s over. But that’s not true. Jimmy Carter ended the first one in the 1970s. But in 1980 Ronald Reagan’s Administration got us into a second one, and George W. Bush’s Administration got us into a third one. Now, perhaps we can put an end to it. But to make that possible, we need to understand the history.

The First Cold War between Russia and the United States began with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 following the Second World War. It created a long, terrible rift between the two very mistrustful, powerful nation-empires, because U.S. President Harry Truman established policies and committed U.S. military and intelligence forces to prevent Russian Soviet imperialistic expansion, while Russian Leader Joseph Stalin declared that Soviet-style Communism was at odds with what he felt was Western Capitalist imperialist expansion. Each side felt it was right and the other was wrong, and each side felt it had to protect the world from the other.

That was a shame, since the Russians and Americans had been allies against Nazi Military Imperialism during World War II. But, unfortunately, the desire for power and control set the stage for a whole lot of conflict, trouble and violence (usually by proxy) around the world. It started to get very serious when the Soviets supported East Berlin in Germany and the U.S. supported West Berlin, and a hard line was drawn and even a huge wall was built dividing Berliners and Germans. Then the same thing happened over North and South Korea, because by that time, the Soviets supported North Korea as well as Communist China, while the U.S. supported and fought for South Korea.

Truman’s policies of restraint in fighting the Korean War were actually crucial in preventing a larger war, but he ended up being hated by Republicans and many right-wing Americans because of it. You see, just as a truce was in the making in Korea, an insubordinate U.S. Army General, Douglas MacArthur, a right-wing Republican, decided on his own, and against the orders of the Commander in Chief, to issue an ultimatum to the North Koreans. Thus MacArthur ruined the truce and extended the war a lot longer. In fact, MacArthur kept pushing for nuclear warfare against the North Koreans and the Chinese, who had come in to help the North Koreans. Fortunately, Truman knew that would only lead to a much wider war, which would have been not only against China, but the Soviet Union as well.

Truman knew what the horrific impact of U.S. atomic bombs he had ordered to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan had been, and he was determined not to be responsible for more horrible deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian men, women and children. He also did not want to lose more American lives. Even as it was, 50,000 American lives were lost in Korea, many of those because MacArthur ruined the first truce. And even though Truman prevented more loss of life, he was severely criticized by many right-wing Americans because he fired General MacArthur for his insubordination, while MacArthur received a ticker-tape parade when he came home. It was very clear that many Americans wanted to continue to be the biggest Super-Power in the world, and prized victory at all costs.

Anyway, in the 1950s and '60s the First Cold War raged in many hot wars, including the Vietnam War, which was also a war by proxy between Russia and the U.S., even though the two major "super-power" sources of the conflict did not actually go to war against each other. And the Vietnam War proved to be a turning point in America’s status as a "moral" force, due to the shameful way the U.S. waged that war. It was one of the biggest indicators that the U.S. Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower had warned us about in 1961 had indeed become more corrupt and dangerous.

You see, there are some Americans even today who still cling to misconceptions about that, mainly due to claims made by Ronald Reagan. Reagan claimed Americans had nothing to be ashamed of, which is why George W. Bush later resorted to claiming that Americans against his war in Iraq were just like the Americans who were against the war in Vietnam, and he claimed that dissent just "aids and comforts the enemy." It was very typical of Reaganites and right-wing imperialistic ideologues like Bush. They still claim that the only reason the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam was because of a so-called "lack of resolve on the part of the American People." They blame American anti-war demonstrators in the 1960s for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and they claim that "if America had really tried to win, we would certainly have won."

That is simply not true. It is a blatant lie to try to denigrate the peace movement of the 1960s, and Americans should understand the truth. The U.S. military leaders tried their damnedest to win the war in Vietnam, but they lost for a couple of very basic reasons. First, they ignored or did not understand the desire and the will of the vast majority of the Vietnamese people. Instead, they served the interests of the relatively few Vietnamese who had become part of the French colonial establishment based in Saigon. And, in waging war as they did, American leadership demonstrated ignorance, carelessness and disregard for the majority of Vietnamese, as well as Cambodians and Laotians. And the second key reason they lost that war was because they grossly underestimated the tenacity and ingenuity of the Vietnamese people, who were simply continuing a very long and hard fight for independence from any foreign influence -- first Chinese, then French, then American. Of course, there were other reasons as well, but those were the two biggest ones, and it's time Americans realized and admitted it.

Just as the Bush Regime was clearly warned by experts against his invasion and occupation of Iraq, predicting what would happen and did happen, so the U.S. Government had been warned by experts on the Far East as early as 1954 against getting involved in Vietnam. Of particular concern at that time was the American support in the early 1950s of the French, who ruled South Vietnam as a French colony but were starting to lose control of it. The U.S. support of the French rule in Vietnam only fueled Vietnamese desire for independence, and it enabled and justified communist influences. The experts even made it known that American efforts were becoming "an extremely ineffective and ultimately hopeless defense of the status quo, showing how absurdly wrong we are to battle Asian nationalism and independence instead of aiding it."

Granted, when the U.S. military actually stepped into South Vietnam with full military fighting forces in 1964, the U.S. government claimed it was to aid South Vietnamese nationalism. And that was partly true, because U.S. leaders by then believed in the "domino theory," which claimed that the communism of China and North Vietnam would be widely spread if it wasn't stopped in South Vietnam.

History, of course, proves that was not true. Unfortunately, the U.S. military forces poisoned Vietnam with 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange, the most toxic and long-lasting chemical ever synthesized by man, dropped countless tons of horribly destructive high explosive bombs on the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians during many years of senseless and fruitless saturation bombing, built a huge amount of helicopter gun ships and other military hardware, all of which made some U.S. Military Contractors very rich, all to no avail. And don't get me started about all the lives lost and all the men, women and children maimed.

Anyway, the First Cold War raged on. But, finally, in the 1970s, the Carter Administration, backed by a preponderance of hard evidence from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intelligence which revealed the increasing decline of Russian Soviet power, de-escalated the First Cold War and entered into a new era of dialogue with the Russian Soviet leaders of the USSR.

The First Cold War hostilities pretty much ended in the ‘70s because Jimmy Carter focused his efforts on finding common ground and working in the spirit of cooperation instead of conflict. After all, as Carter has shown, even as an ex-president, he is a man of great compassion and goodness, and of peace, and he is a true Christian. And President Jimmy Carter's initiatives and policies could have changed the world for the better.

Unfortunately, the world has gotten worse because Carter's efforts were squashed and negated by a concerted propaganda campaign in the early 1980s lead by Ronald Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, who actually started the Second Cold War and, as you will see, helped to set the scene for the trouble to come. As I explained on the page titled Reagan's Real Legacy, in the early 1980s Ronald Reagan and his team of right-wing Republican ideologues influenced and manipulated the U.S. intelligence community and began to dismantle the policy of détente, which had been established with bipartisan support during the Carter presidency.

The Reaganites came to power waving the flag, thumping their bible and rattling their swords. They claimed that America had "nothing to be ashamed of" regarding Vietnam or anything else. They also claimed the Soviet Union was still a terrible threat, and they even accused the CIA of "underestimating the intensity, scope, and implicit threat" that the Soviets posed to American security. And many Americans were eager to believe them. The Reaganites, who established the New Right and were the key players of the early "Neo-Conservative" movement, as it's called now, adopted the old Machiavellian strategy of establishing foreign policy based on economic-financial and political expediency above all else, and focusing on, exaggerating and even fabricating a threat from an enemy, in this case the Soviet Union, which Reagan called "The Evil Empire." (And it should be noted that George W. Bush later followed suit early in his presidency by labeling an "Axis of Evil" in the same way.) And the Reaganites did that in spite of the fact that the Soviet Union was already in severe decline and was destined to crumble regardless of what Americans did. (See the page on Reagan's Real Legacy.)

The Reaganites did that because they had a highly motivated economic interest in military spending and growth of the Military Industrial Complex, which, as I said, Republican President Eisenhower had warned against in his farewell address when he left office in 1961. (See the page on Little Known American History.)

Bechtel Corporation's president, George Schulz, was one of the most influential players in formulating the Reaganite agenda, as were the right-wing imperialist-minded ideologues like former CIA Director George H. W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and advisors Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who influenced or colluded with Reagan and the corporate special interests that he served. Thus, in terms of foreign policy, the Reaganites adopted the politics of fear, and began the Second Cold War with the Soviet Union, and went ahead with a dramatic military build-up and escalation of conflict, and even hostilities in many different places in the world, all under the guise of "fighting Communism" while actually serving American corporate interests. The American commercial news media failed to do its job to find out the truth and educate the American people, so the Reaganites were able to fool many Americans and not only indulge in a military build-up and start up a Second Cold War, but also usher in Reaganomics and create a recession, a huge deficit, another decade of fear and conflict, nuclear weapons proliferation, "Star Wars," etc., trouble in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere, all of which served to further the agenda of making some American corporate industry executives a whole lot richer.

In 1989, the Soviet Union suffered a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and was forced to withdraw from there, and its decline as a super-power was increased and quickened. But, unfortunately, the Reaganites chose to seize the opportunity to gain the upper hand, rather than use the opportunity to assist Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia's leader at the time, in his reformist policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Thus, Russia was hindered and was unable to establish economic security and real reform, and instead had to squander much on a pointless and needless military and nuclear weapons race with the Reagan Regime.

Some historians and analysts believe that the self-serving folly of the Reaganites unwittingly helped set in motion a series of events that ultimately resulted in many of the terrible consequences we've seen in the world, especially in many of the failed nations that were in the sphere and control of the former Soviet Union. I think there's some truth to that, and we have been seeing the results throughout the 1990s and in this decade to the present time, which even include nuclear weapons material and munitions finding their way into the hands of terrorists and rogue nations.

Of course, in the 1990s the Clinton Administration did what they could to deal with the mess the early Reaganites had made, but they were unable to because of a Reaganite Republican-controlled Congress. It is worthy of note, however, that during the eight years under President Clinton, the U.S. did not use its military might to protect any American-supported foreign dictators or American economic interests in foreign countries. Clinton deserves credit for being the first American president to accomplish that since 1945, establishing a precedent that should have been followed, but wasn't.

Indeed, after the Bush II Regime gained power in 2000, things only got worse.

If you read the page on Bush's Real Record and War, you will see exactly how and why the Bush Regime only made things worse, especially because of its nuclear weapons revival and expansion (which has been going on behind the scenes because the American commercial news media has failed to do its job and report it), and also because of their obviously imperialistic efforts to increase their corporate globalism movement, and gain a more firm foothold in oil-rich Iraq and Kuwait to increase American influence in the Mid-East.

Many Americans do not realize that the Bush Regime tried to implement the plan they made in September 2000 in their document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, written in by a right-wing conservative think-tank called Project for the New American Century (PNAC), spearheaded by the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, William Kristol, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennet, Dan Quayle and other like-minded right-wing imperialistic ideologues. It shows how and why Bush's War in Iraq was not about helping Iraqis. It's about American corporate control of Iraqi oil, and gaining a firm military foothold in the region as a "new American frontier," just as that document and plan reveals. Therefore, while most of the troops in the U.S. Military forces are well-meaning, good people, they were actually unwitting dupes of the corrupt Bush Regime and its Commander in Chief.

The Bush Regime and the Reaganites/Bushites in Congress started the Third Cold War with Russia, exacerbated and escalated the hot war on Muslim extremists, and plunged America into a bloody quagmire in Iraq. The American people were deliberately and systematically deceived by a group of right-wing conservative Reaganite/Bushite ideologues who manipulated and distorted or simply ignored intelligence, and even used blatant lies to drag this country into war and into yet another nuclear arms race. And it has made some very wealthy Americans a whole lot richer.

The Russians have been very aware of the Bushite Neo-Conservative plan for world dominance, and it is no wonder that when the Russian state TV channel recently ran a poll, there was only one question, "Choose the person you consider to be the most outstanding leader in the recent Russian History." By an overwhelming margin (90%) the people had chosen Joseph Stalin, who we know as one of the more ruthless and murderous tyrants in the Twentieth Century. Of course, we do not know whether that is the actual choice of the Russian people, or whether the state manipulated the results. Either way, it shows that there is a Russian desire for strict, strong, ruthless rule to bring Russia back to Superpower status in the world. And it was mainly in reaction to the Bush Regime's and the Neo-Conservative PNAC's plan for world dominance. (See the page titled Bush's Real Record and War.)

In August 2008, many Americans jumped to the conclusion that Russia was resorting to brutal military imperialism again in its invasion of Georgia to restore its superpower status. I think there is some truth to that. But, the Bush Regime had no moral authority and was hypocritical in criticizing Russia. And I'll tell you another big reason why.

The Bush Administration made the situation worse by claiming that the conflict between Georgia and Russia that began during early August was simply about Soviet-style Russian imperialism. But it is far more complex than that, and the U.S. is not an innocent observer.

In the first place, the U.S.-backed Georgian president really started the major violence on August 8, and when you learn the history you will see why there was such a strong Russian military response.

It is true that the roots of the problem are indeed originally in the Russian Soviet imperialism in the early 1900s. However, as the Soviet Union began to break up in the late 1980s it became more complicated for several reasons, and more recently a big part of the conflict is about control of oil and natural gas energy resources. The U.S. shares complicity in creating the conflict about that, which is one of the reasons why this is all relevant regarding the Third Cold War. But the Georgian-Russian turf battle is somewhat separate from that, because while part of it is about ethnic conflicts and concerns, most of it is about energy resources.

In the 1990s the situation became worse and more complicated when an idea backed by the U.S. established a plan to create oil and natural gas pipelines from Azerbaijan to Turkey, running through Georgia so they would deliberately bypass Russia.

When pro-Western President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power in Georgia in 2004 by way of a revolution, Georgia became closer to the U.S., and the presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia stood with the Georgian president. In fact, they all supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, because they feel they need the U.S. support against Russia. They are still very afraid of a Russian occupation, and they don't forget the sixty years of Soviet Russian military dominance.

When the Bush Regime began urging Georgian President Saakashvili to become part of NATO, Russia objected. Then when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered a military operation from a command post in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia. Saakashvili accused Putin of wanting "to depose the democratically elected government of Georgia."

In 2005 the United States helped open the 1,000-mile-long pipeline that connected Azerbaijan to Turkey, running through Georgia deliberately to bypass Russia. More oil and natural gas pipelines are scheduled to be built in Georgia. That's why the U.S. has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building up the Georgian military, specifically to protect the pipeline against Russian sabotage and attack.

Pentagon and State Department documents reveal that this is about energy security, not about democracy or human rights or the other justifications that have been given. This was confirmed when the Bush Regime's U.S. Department of Defense funded a military exercise with Georgia in July, 2008, and the U.S. Secretary of State even visited there, apparently in support.

That is why it is now the ambition of the Russian leadership, especially Vladimir Putin, to dominate the flow of oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe, so they could maximize the profit and the political advantage of dominating the flow of Caspian energy resources to Europe. And by building these alternate pipelines, the U.S. is trying to undercut Russia?s political and economic power in Europe.

So it seems that this is really a geopolitical contest between the U.S. and Russia for influence in Europe, and a contest for natural resources.

A big part of the problem was Dick Cheney, who pushed a Neo-Conservative foreign policy which wasn't interested in cooperation but in confrontation and in ramping up the Third Cold War with Russia. Some experts on the region suspect that the staffs of Vice President Cheney and Republican presidential candidate John McCain were motivated to serve the interests of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex, which would benefit from stoking the Third Cold War. Some also suspect that Cheney and McCain told Saakashvili that if he invaded South Ossetia, he would get much more support from the United States than he did, and that this is what motivated him to provoke this conflict. That may be cynical and biased, but it is not an illogical assumption. After all, it's really all about money and the control of natural resources. Bush and Cheney are oil men, and that is what has driven their actions in Kuwait and Iraq as well.

As a U.S. military protectorate, Georgia has received hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid, and there are U.S. military instructors in Georgia. And that is seen by Moscow as an offensive effort that the Bush administration pushed. Some experts even say it is tied to plans for putting missile interceptors in Poland, to go along with the radars in Czechoslovakia. Russians see this as a Cold War assault on Russia coming from Washington, tied also to plans to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, which the Bush administration favored. So, the Russians feel they're very threatened. That's why they view it as something that required a strong countermove.

Indeed, on August 28, 2008, Vladimir Putin implied if not accused the Bush Regime of orchestrating the Georgian-Russian conflict to benefit U.S. presidential candidate John McCain and the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex. Putin also said Russian defense officials believed that U.S. citizens were in the conflict area supporting the Georgian military when it attacked the separatist region of South Ossetia. So the Third Cold War definitely heated up as Bush's reign came to a close.

How long will it be before the American people realize it, and restore sanity to American foreign policy?

It shouldn't be too long, because there are now only about 30 percent of the American people that still believe that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush served God and Country. And eventually those people will have to face the truth.

As I have on other pages, I concede that Reaganites and Bushites may have actually believed they were doing the right thing, and they may be good husbands, good fathers, and good friends to their friends. However, even the most brutal, murderous fascists believed they were doing the right thing, and some of them even believed they were fulfilling the will of God. After all, even Adolph Hitler believed he would usher in a thousand year reign to fulfill Christian prophecy.

Hitler said many times and in many ways that he "served the Lord Jesus Christ." For example, Hitler said things like these: "Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. ... For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. ... I believe I would be no Christian if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today my poor people are plundered and exploited."

Hitler was the epitome of evil masquerading as good. And I must say that the Reaganites and Bushites masquerade as good when they are not. Oh, they have been good for the wealthiest few and their huge corporations, but they have not been good for the majority of people in the nation and the world. They are also deluded with self-importance and self-righteousness, and corrupted by greed, which is why they tend to be disingenuous and often deceitful and deceptive.

That's why they felt that torturing prisoners was justified, and that their desired ends justified any means to accomplish them. They have clearly not acted and do not act in the spirit of good will or brotherhood with their fellow human beings on the planet. Instead, they act in the interests of themselves, the wealthiest few, and the huge mega-corporations that have provided the financial support for them to have gained and maintained power for so long.

Most Americans now have some idea of how bad George W. Bush was as a president, but most do not know the whole story. And I submit that when as president he could deny habeas corpus and due process to any human being and even to his own fellow citizens; when he could violate the U.S. Constitution; when he could start ill-advised and perhaps illegal wars on false premises; when he could commit war crimes by allowing torture of prisoners and by permitting U.S. military forces to kill up to 30 innocent civilians per air strike as "acceptable collateral damage"; when he could allow illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens; when he could assume other dictatorial powers and issue statements and decrees of the types that Bush did, with impunity, avoiding deserved impeachment and even avoiding huge demonstrations and protests against him on the streets of our cities, it would seem that many Americans had become either as blind flocks, or as hopeless, helpless subjects.

But I tell you we can put an end to hot wars and cold wars. We can have government of, by and for all the people, and we will have it as soon as enough people get the message and abide by God's will. Then we will no longer be divided and ruled by a rich partisan "pretender to the throne." We will share the "throne" as equal joint heirs, and, at long last we will have government that is truly of, by and for the people. We will be able to govern ourselves, determine our own destiny, and use the common wealth for the common good.

That's why the message from the Spirit of truth is so very important. It shows how we can end the divisive competition for power, wealth and domain, and instead share it as we should.

You see, while some people think "democratic" partisan party politics will do the trick now that they’ve achieved victory over the opposing party; while some other people think the only answer is in some form of Communism; and while still other people think that Religious Theocracy will establish good and righteous government, they are ALL wrong.

First, partisan party politics only perpetuates conflict, division, and instability. Secondly, while Russian-style Communism was originally based on justifiable anger at the European capitalistic nobility and aristocracy, the Russian Bolsheviks were wrong in calling for violent revolution to overthrow and destroy the capitalists, and most subsequent Communists have been even more wrong in advocating and perpetuating totalitarian rule. And thirdly, "good theocracy" is an oxymoron, because true servants of God do not seek to rule the people, but to liberate and empower them.

Now is the time for all good, conscientious people to come together, to stand up and demonstrate your will and be counted, to bring about a peaceful, nonviolent revolution and reformation and establish government that is truly of, for and by the people. For I tell you that the average people who are the humble and meek of this world shall indeed inherit the earth. But it will not happen unless and until you make it happen. (And that is spelled out on the pages titled An Updated Declaration of Independence, and How the Meek Shall inherit the Earth.)