[lbo-talk] Matthew Rothschild: No Good Guys in Russia-Georgia War

Charles A. Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Aug 12 15:37:31 PDT 2008


``....No Good Guys in Russia-Georgia War By Matthew Rothschild''

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Of course we are all for peace, truth, and justice. But there is something wrong about the above. I just can't think of a concise way to explain it.

The point of view seems to take the strategic reasoning that supposedly justified containment for granted. That's the whole problem. Maybe there were serious strategic reasons for the US to consider the USSR a military threat say between August 1945 and about 1950. But after that period or near it, those reasons vanished. It was a tremendous mistake to keep the cold war going and ramped up. It fed itself in a endless feedback of the nuclear arms race.

The deliberate provocations of the US and UK in that early post-WWII period, including especially the implicit threats of nuclear weapons, and hints to use them again created the Cold War, and hence the arm race. There was a UN resolution on the table ready to sign to abolish nuclear weapons, and the US refused to sign it. The Russians wanted it, because they wanted assurances the US wouldn't bomb them. The US didn't want such a ban, because we knew we couldn't stop the Russian Army any other way....

Nevermind. The Rothschild article just reminds me that the US has never stopped the Cold War, not for a single day.

CG



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