"Recently, I grabbed a taxi in Moscow. When the driver asked me where I
was from, I told him the United States. “I went there once,” he said,
“to Chicago. I really liked it.”
“But tell me something,” he added. “When are we going to war?”
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| Atomic War: often result of irresponsible Politicians and Journalists |
The question, put so starkly, so honestly, shocked me. “Well, I hope never,” I replied. “No one wants war.”
At the office, I ask a Russian employee about the mood in his working
class Moscow neighborhood. The old people are buying salt, matches and
gretchka [buckwheat], he tells me—the time-worn refuge for Russians stocking up on essentials in case of war.
In the past two months, I’ve traveled to the Baltic region, to Georgia, and to Russia. Talk of war is everywhere.
In Estonia, at the Lennart Meri security conference, we take a bus
two and a half hours to the east of Tallinn, to Narva, a city on the
border with Russia, for a discussion: “What is Narva Afraid of?” a
variant on the geo-political debate: “Is Narva Next?”
In an interview widely quoted in the Russian media, a foreign affairs
expert and a member of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy
and Defense Council, Sergei Karaganov, told the German magazine
Der Spiegel that Western propaganda against Russia “is reminiscent of the period preceding a new war.”
“The help offered by NATO is not symbolic help for the Baltic
states,” he said. “It is a provocation. If NATO initiates an
encroachment--against a nuclear power like ourselves--it will be
punished.”
President Vladimir Putin himself plays both sides against the middle,
warning the West that Russia will have to “strengthen the potential of
its strategic nuclear forces” in order to counter the United States’
missile shield, while at the same time insisting it’s the West, not
Russia, that’s destroying the balance that kept the world from nuclear
conflict during the Cold War.
During the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June, he tells the heads
of international news agencies that the U.S. is lying when it claims its
missile defense system will not threaten Russia:
As I browse in a Moscow gift shop, a t-shirt catches my eye: a
buff-looking Vladimir Putin dressed in a black turtleneck and tight
black pants, with the words “SAVE THE WORLD” in white letters across his
image.
How? There’s no answer on this t-shirt and, in the real world, no magic prescription.
But all the talk of war isn’t as crazy as it seems, several Russians
tell me. “They may not love us,” they say, “but they fear us.”
Note EU-Digest: This
quoted article by Jill Dougherty is a perfect example of pro-NATO
propaganda, support of the weapons industry and irresponsible
journalism. It is packed with scary comments, refueling cold war fears
and whipping up peoples emotions.
The EU
must speak out that it does not want another cold or God forbid a hot
war war with Russia, and that it does not support NATO troop movements
on Russia's borders, regardless of what the US or the usually "short
sighted" Eastern European EU members are saying.The NATO, being
perfectly honest, is also an organization, whose time has come and
gone, and for the past 20 years certainly has not achieved any positive
track record
Read more: In Europe and Russia, There’s Talk of War
