Every Action Has a Reaction

It is a basic law of physics that every action has a reaction. It seems strange that our Secretary of State, a Stanford graduate, just doesn’t seem to get it. Now as for our president, well forget about that. Here’s the case.

Over the last couple of years the US has been shopping around Europe for places to install anti-missile based radar stations. The Czechs agree, as did the Poles. Now while it is not directly comparable, this did remind me of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of ‘62. Remember? The Russians were installing missiles in Cuba 90 miles of our coast. Now did they really think there would not be a very serious reaction? (Every action has a reaction.)

Man did we react! First we setup a naval blockade. Then we told the Russians we would never permit their missiles on our doorstep; or put another way, in our “sphere of influence.” Any superpower worth its weight in salt clearly has a sphere of influence. Then there was the exchange of communications where an agreement was reached for the Russians to eliminate the Cuban missiles and we would do the same with our missiles in Turkey. Each superpower preserved their spheres of influence as well as saving face. More significant was both parties willingness to back off in order to avoid a nuclear confrontation.

If we learned anything from the Cuban Missile crisis, it should have been “every action has a reaction.” It is now 46 years later. What is doubly puzzling is the fact that Condi Rice is supposed to be a Russian specialist. How could she not know that we are just baiting the Russian Bear when we stick it to them with anti missile radar tracking within their sphere of influence.

That brings me to the present US-Russia crisis over Georgia and the region called South Ossetia. I believe the Russians needed a way to show the US that it is not going to stand idly by and watch us put anti-missile radar bases within their spheres of influence. Not much difference than our reaction to Cuban missiles in our sphere of influence.

This is just another example of the Bush Administration’s notion that they can wander around the world deciding what and where they will alight to support or undermine various countries or its parts. This, of course, is policy that begets disasters as it does not take into consideration all the other variables that will arise and slap the “intruders” smack in the face. If we have any sense of reality, we need to recognize our need to find ways to coexist in a world that has lots of nuclear bombs laying around and is not necessarily being run along our lines of governance. That’s what made it possible to keep the peace between the two great nuclear powers in the years of the cold war. I do look forward to an administration that will engage with others in the world and not feel itself anointed as the worlds super-state in charge of deciding who stays and who goes.

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.

P.S. As I warned some time ago, the attacks on Obama are going to make the attacks on Kerry look like child play. Well here they come with Mr. Corsi, same slime-bag who did Swift Boat stuff on Kerry, with a book on how Obama will turn the country into an Islamic state. Not pretty, but why should those folks change color now? Lets all be hitting back as hard as we can.