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75 years after Germany Invaded Russia, Putin sees history repeating itself

from Russia Insider & RT

 

OffG says: Vladimir Putin’s address to the closing session of the Duma highlights Russia’s increasing anxiety over the warmongering rhetoric issuing from Washington and NATO. His emphasis – yet again – on his country’s willingness to work co-operatively with the West is in stark contrast to the disingenuous representations in the corporate media, where Russia is routinely presented as “aggressive” and a “threat.” In truth, Russia is doing nothing “aggressive” other than decline to bend to Western pressure over its own interests.

This is fast becoming much more than a question of political allegiance. The West is openly encouraging the impression it is preparing for war. Even if this is just elaborate pretence, or budget-enhancing sabre-rattling, it’s clear the rhetoric is at an unprecedented pitch. Coupled with the almost endless NATO “exercises” on or near the Russian border, and the build-up of military hardware in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the potential for this to go critical – even if no-one intends it – is probably greater now than during most times in the Cold War. 

Russia manifestly does not want war. But they will defend themselves if they need to.

 

Russia will take adequate measures to counter NATO’s increasingly “aggressive rhetoric,” President Vladimir Putin told MPs at the closing session of the State Duma. He called to create an international security system open to all countries.

It’s necessary to create a collective security system void of “bloc-like thinking” and open to all countries, Putin said on Wednesday in Russia’s parliament.

Russia is ready to discuss this extremely important issue…but again, as it was at the beginning of WWII, we don’t see any positive response. On the contrary, NATO ups its aggressive rhetoric and aggressive actions near our borders.

 Vladimir Putin

 

“Russia is ready to discuss this extremely important issue,” he said, adding that such proposals have been so far left unanswered by Western countries.

“But again, as it was at the beginning of WWII, we don’t see any positive response,” he continued. “On the contrary, NATO ups its aggressive rhetoric and aggressive actions near our borders.”

“In this environment, we must pay special attention to strengthening our country’s defense capabilities,” he concluded.

Terrorism has become the major threat to international security, Putin said, comparing it to the rise of Nazism before WWII. Facing this challenge, the international community should work together rather than remain separated and divided, he said.

“What kind of lessons are needed to get rid of old-fashioned ideological discord and geopolitical games and unite in the fight against international terrorism? This common threat is rising right in front of us,” Putin said.

Security issues should not prevail over economic growth and well being, the president warned: “Security and international affairs are equally important, but there is nothing more important than economy and welfare.

“These are indeed very complicated and tough issues, but our country’s future depends on how we will tackle them.”

Putin’s keynote address comes amid NATO’s build-up in Eastern Europe. After Crimea’s re-unification with Russia in 2014, the bloc started deployment of troops, equipment and infrastructure to Poland and Baltic countries, arguing that it would protect the region from alleged “Russian aggression.”

At the upcoming Warsaw summit in July, NATO leaders are expected to green-light deployment of four battalions of up to 800 troops in each unit to the Baltic States and Poland, along with intensifying the scale and pace of multinational military exercises. Recent live-fire drills, Anakonda 2016, Saber Strike and BALTOPS, involved thousands of troops and hundreds of combat vehicles to simulate large-scale operations in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Moscow says NATO’s build-up and its hostile rhetoric towards Russia aren’t helping to improve security and stability in Europe, and have triggered reciprocal measures.

The State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, is expected to go into summer recess before the general election starts this autumn. MPs will spend two months in the summer visiting their constituencies to meet voters, gearing up for the Duma elections scheduled for September.

Addressing the lawmakers, President Putin said the race has to be fair and transparent, and free of foul play. “I would like to thank all of you for everything that has been done over the past years … and, of course, look forward to seeing what we will be doing together with the parliament in the future,” he told MPs.

 

hillary a neoconservative hawk?... Sure...

 

Is Hillary Clinton a Neoconservative Hawk? What Iraq and Libya Decisions Tell Us About Her Foreign Policy


Hillary got Iraq vote wrong, and Libya and Syria too. If she were setting the policies, what would they look like?
By Paul Rosenberg / Salon
December 27, 2015

Two election cycles after losing the Democratic Party nomination because of her Iraq War vote, Hillary Clinton finally seems to have put it behind her. In fact, with the latest wave of ISIS hysteria, her hawkishness is seen by some as a plus. At the same time, striking a balance, a good case can be made that, though she did vote to authorize the Iraq War, she would never have started it herself if she had been president.

John Kerry made that very same argument back in 2004, in fact. As Kevin Drum described at the time, the media was echoing the Bush campaign spin, presenting Kerry’s position as confused and ludicrous at best, and as inconsistent flip-flopping at worst. But actually his position was a familiar one to them:

[T]hey know very well that there are lots and lots of liberal hawks and other former war supporters who have exactly the same position: pressuring Saddam was good, inspections were good, and eventually war might have been good.

read more: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hillary-clinton-neoconservative-hawk-what-iraq-and-libya-decisions-tell-us-about


Nothing has changed much in Hillary's mind since this article publication in December last year — except a move towards more aggression... The cage door will soon be left opened... And the hard-core Neocons in the Republican party prefer Clinton to Trump... Imagine in the toon at top that Trump would be a Donald quacky duck about to be plucked...

Note: the article at top from OffG. Unable to link OffG articles on this OLD computer. Find it yourself. 

 

why is the US empire keen to restart the "cold war"?...

 

Behind the US Desire to Restart the Cold War
© Sputnik/ Aleksey Nikolskyi
POLITICS

The US Congress has proposed a bill seeking to re-establish a Cold War-era body to counter Russian espionage. Patrick Armstrong, former political counselor at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, and long-time analyst of the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, detailed the reasons why the US seeks to restart the Cold War.

New York-based internet media website BuzzFeed recently reported, citing an unnamed source in the US intelligence service, that the legislation in question calls to revive a presidentially-appointed group to counter "Russian spies and Russian-sponsored assassinations," in the United States. The group would also investigate the funding of Russian "covert broadcasting" and "media manipulation."

"One should never forget that all these kinds of bills actually put money into some people's pocket," Armstrong told Radio Sputnik.

The analyst asserts that there is money behind the invention and constant promotion of a "Russian threat." The US military is currently committed to "fabulously" expensive projects that "never really come to an end but everybody makes a pile of money out of." Playing the "bad Russians" card is a good way to stimulate business, he suggests.
"My favorite one was the Panama papers. ‘Ha! Finally we have proof that Putin is stealing money and hiding it abroad', [although] Putin's name doesn't appear anywhere in the papers [but] today we have the theory that obviously it's Putin behind the leak of the Panama papers," Armstrong observed. "There is no limit to this ridiculousness."

"What are the current stories now?" he asked. "Oh yes, Russia hacks into the DNC (Democratic National Committee) computer. No, it's some guy in a basement in Romania, just like the last guy who hacked into Hillary Clinton's stuff."

"Nobody's going to come out and say ‘Oh Gee, I guess we're just plain lying about Russians in Syria, invasion in Ukraine and the coming collapse of Russia… What they're going to say is that…'Putin has somehow cleverly got into people's minds, we need more money.'"

Another motive, Armstrong suggests, is US determination to expand NATO, in an attempt to get "better control of things."

"Somewhere," he asserted, "along the line, [the US] realized that expanding NATO — when all NATO membership meant was that you blew up Libya, or you joined in to celebrate the third decade of a losing war in Afghanistan — wasn't going to pull in new members. So it's trying to revive the old Russian threat."

A so-called 2017 Intelligence Authorization Bill was passed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee in May, and awaits Senate approval. Armstrong predicts that the bill will most likely be approved, but noted that the idea of a "big enemy" is not really selling. He cited a recent Pew poll showing that no more than 1/3 of EU nationals consider Russia to be a threat to anything.

As for the Moscow's reaction to such moves, Armstrong said that Russia doesn't want war and, along with China, is playing an "intelligent" hand.

"[Russia] is playing a much more intelligent game than anybody in the West," he said. "The problem is managing the downfall of the American empire. 20 to 30 years from now, when China, Russia, Iran, India are much more important than they are today, and the US is definitely declining, the trick is, how do you get to there, from here, without blowing everything up? The last days of a declining empire are always very dangerous."
The analyst shared his thoughts on America's next president.

"We've got to get through the next 25-30 years without the US blowing the […] out of all of us, so what I would like to have for the next four years is a president good at negotiating. What we've had until now is, ‘do what we want or we bomb you.'"

 

read more: http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160623/1041783848/us-restarting-cold-war.html

 

See also: homer's odyssey...

 

hawks' nukes...

The US Senate’s top war hawk was joined by the head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee in questioning the Obama administration’s commitment to a 21st Century Nuclear Arms Race.

On Monday, Senate Armed Services Chair John McCain (R-AZ) and Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker (R-TN) released a letter to the Obama administration calling for the United States to maintain its commitment to expanding and upgrading the country’s nuclear arsenal, a move seemingly at odds with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.


The two Republican senators expressed concern with President Barack Obama’s near apology in Hiroshima last month, as well as White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes recent commentary at an Arms Control Association that suggests a departure from America’s aggressive foreign policy posture.

"We are concerned Mr. Rhodes’ comments may presage efforts, such as a rumored Blue Ribbon panel, to review the modernization program you promised to fund for as long as you are president, which would obviously contradict your personal promise to the Senate and military necessity," read the letter, written on June 17.

The nuclear "modernization" plan is projected to cost in excess of $350 billion over the course of the next ten years, and will lead to a massive increase of America’s atomic arsenal.


The modernization effort will see the US Air Force acquiring 1,100 new Long Range Stand-Off (LRSO) nuclear-armed cruise missiles and a spate of advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) that officials believe will be able to penetrate anti-ballistic missile shields.

The US Air Force is not the only military service that will see an expansion in stockpiles. The US Navy will also acquire scores of upgraded Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles under the program.

During his visit to Hiroshima, Japan, President Barack Obama called for a "world without nuclear weapons." Ben Rhodes similarly suggested that the Obama administration would look to decrease the nuclear stockpile, seeking only to "maintain a credible deterrence that can sustain itself in the coming decades."

Andrew Weber, a former Obama administration official who served as the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, also cautioned against increasing the US atomic stockpile. He cited excessive costs and the unnecessary power of some US nuclear weapons.

The US B83 gravity bomb, for instance, has a yield of over one megaton, roughly 75 times the catastrophic yield of the Hiroshima "Little Boy" bomb that killed nearly 150,000 Japanese civilians. 

"It has no legitimate use today," said Weber at the Arms Control Association conference. "We don’t need nuclear weapons in the megaton plus range of yield."


Senators McCain and Corker disagree with this assessment, calling for a flood of new taxpayer dollars to acquire more nuclear weapons with greater yield.

A recent poll shows John McCain losing his reelection bid for a sixth term in the US Senate to upstart Democratic Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick by two points, signaling that Arizona voters no longer care for the war hawk’s apocalyptic foreign policy agenda.

http://sputniknews.com/military/20160628/1042107822/mccain-obama-nukes-russia-war.html

 

Don't worry Mr McCain... La Madam Clinton, the one you hate, will do accordingly, while mad Trump, the one you should love, won't...

Yes, the choice is grim: a warmongering woman who wants revenge or a peace-seeking business loony golf course developer shark. Both religious to the eyeballs, except both of them are lying. We're in deep shit....

a useless policy...

IRBIL, Iraq — The U.S. military’s efforts to confront the Islamic State in Syria suffered another setback Wednesday after the militants routed the only group to have survived intact an ill-fated Pentagon program to train and equip moderate rebels last year.

The U.S.-backed New Syrian Army said it was forced to withdraw its forces to its base at Tanf near the Jordanian border after launching what appears to have been a poorly conceived offensive aimed at capturing the strategically important eastern Syrian town of Abu Kamal on the Syrian-Iraqi border.

Islamic State claims published by its Amaq news agency that its fighters had killed 40 members of the group and captured 15 could not be independently confirmed and appeared to be exaggerated. Islamic State social media accounts posted photographs and videos showing brutalized bodies, the beheading of one fighter and small quantities of captured, U.S.- supplied weaponry.

The New Syrian Army said in a statement only that it lost “several men” before the group “successfully departed” to Tanf, more than 150 miles away in remote desert terrain near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders.

read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/islamic-state-routs-pentagon-backed-syrian-rebels-in-fresh-setback-for-us-strategy/2016/06/29/41833a16-3e0b-11e6-9e16-4cf01a41decb_story.html

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Between you, me and a Lamppost in Vladivostok, the best way to defeat ISIS is to let the Russians and Assad fight it full on, while the other mob should lay down their weapons and make peace with Assad. Here one would have to be circumspect as some ISIS personnel would try to pass as "moderate" and infiltrate the Syrian forces. Thus a simple rule should apply. The Russians know what to do on that score: trust no-one.