Cuban Missile Crisis Redux

Just read that the Russians are planning Naval exercises with Venezuela in the Caribbean later this year, in what seems to me to be a predictable response to US meddling in Eastern Europe.

This is reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which at the time was presented here at home as Soviet aggression in Cuba, but which was actually a reaction to US placement of missiles in Turkey. What finally ended the crisis was not, as popularly thought, simply the threat of nuclear war ("Kruschev blinked") but was rather a quiet agreement for us to remove our missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Russians removing theirs in Cuba.

I can predict that we will read a slew of self-righteous articles in the right-wing press about the Russian insult to the USA (how dare they meddle in our hemisphere!) along with ominous threats from the Bush administration. And, of course, a supporting chorus will be provided by FOX News and other organs of the national stupidity. No doubt, Mssrs. O'Reilly and Limbaugh will demand that we nuke Moscow or something equally helpful.

Kennedy was a hawk, but not as stupid a hawk as Bush is. If Bush were Kennedy, we might see a gradual reversal of our policy of courting the Georgians and the Poles and trying to put missile technology on Russia's border. But, since Bush is Bush, we're more likely to see Ms. Rice sent on a a so-called goodwill tour of other countries on Russia's borders to let them know of our committment to "freedom and democracy," while getting them to sign onto missile (defense) systems for their own countries.

It seems that, in the last few months of his lame-duck presidency, Bush wants to add to his legacy of pissing off the middle east and our former allies in western europe, by bringing back the cold (and maybe not so cold) war as well.