The Third U.S. Cold War with the Russians

(Revised 4-20-2008)

 

The First Cold War between Russia and the United States began with the Truman Doctrine following the Second World War, and it created a long, terrible rift between the two very mistrustful, powerful nations.

 

In the 1970s the Carter Administration, backed by a preponderance of hard evidence from CIA intelligence indicating the increasing decline of Soviet power, deescalated the First Cold War and entered into a new era of dialogue with the Soviet leaders of the USSR.

 

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

 

Unfortunately, the world has gotten worse because his efforts were squashed and negated by a concerted propaganda campaign lead by Ronald Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Bush Sr., who actually started the Second Cold War and, as you will see, unwitting helped to set the scene for the conflicts and the terrorism to come.

Before I continue, I must emphasize, as I have on other pages, that I concede that Reaganites and Bushites may actually believe they are 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 believe they are doing the right thing, and some of them even believe they are fulfilling the will of God. After all, even Adolph Hitler believed he would usher in a thousand year reign of the “pure Aryan race” to fulfill Christian prophecy.

 

The fact is that the Reaganites and Bushites are also deluded with self-importance and self-righteousness, and corrupted by greed, which is why they tend to be disingenuous and often deceitful. It’s also why they feel that torturing prisoners is justified, and that their desired ends justify 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 and the huge mega-corporations that have provided the financial support for them to gain and maintain power for so long.

 

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.

 

When the right-wing Reaganites came to power, they claimed that 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.

The Reaganites, who established the New Right and were the key players of the early “neo-conservative” movement, as it’s called now, opted to use the old Machiavelian strategy of focusing on, exaggerating and even fabricating a threat from an enemy (in this case the Soviet Union), in spite of the fact that the Soviet Union was already in severe decline.

 

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

 

Now, 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, 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.

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., which made a few Americans a whole lot richer. (See the page on Reagan’s Real Legacy.)

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. And, since the Bush II Regime came to power in 2000, things have only gotten worse. 

 

If you read the page on Bush’s Real Record and War, you will see exactly how and why the Bush Regime has 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 to increase American influence in the Mid-East.

 

Many Americans do not realize that the Bush Regime has been trying 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 is not about helping Iraqis. It’s about American corporate control of Iraqi oil, and gaining a firm military foothold in the region, 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 are 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 have been 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.

 

How long will it be before the American people realize it, and put a stop to it?