Democracy for Vancouver

Before things get really out of hand:

POLAND and the US were ready to sign a deal to build a US missile defence base in the former Soviet state - a pact that has infuriated Moscow.

The deal to locate 10 US interceptor missiles at a base just 180km from Russia’s westernmost frontier has further strained Moscow’s ties with the West, already in a tailspin over Russia’s conflict with Georgia, a former Soviet republic turned US ally.

President Lech Kaczynski said Wednesday would be “an important day in our history”.

The deal “strengthens Poland’s position in the world,” Mr Kaczynski said in a televised address last night. The country has in recent years joined the European Union and NATO.
…
On Tuesday, NATO foreign ministers in Brussels condemned Russian military action in Georgia as “disproportionate and inconsistent” with Moscow’s peacekeeping role and said the alliance could not carry on “business as usual” with Moscow.

Russia hit back yesterday, accusing the European alliance of being “unobjective and biased” and of whitewashing a “criminal regime”.

“The (NATO) declaration above all appears unobjective and biased because there’s not a word about how all this started, why it happened, who started the aggressive action, and who armed Georgia,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

And further from the Russians:

The night before the deal was signed, the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow received a tip from a “a well-placed official in the Russian Ministry of Defense” who wishes to remain anonymous, adds the Associated Press. The official said that Russia would imminently announce plans to suspend military cooperation with the NATO alliance.

And from our resident Russia expert and diplomat par excellence:

Speaking to Reuters in Warsaw, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced Russia’s remarks about military action against Poland as “pathetic rhetoric,” saying they “border on the bizarre.”

And:

“The behaviour of Russia in this most recent conflict is isolating Russia from the principles of co-operation among nations,” she said.

“When you start invading smaller neighbours, bombing civilian infrastructure, going into villages and wreaking havoc and (carrying out) the wanton destruction of (its) infrastructure, that is isolating.”

Our Condi, always there with the irony when we need it least. You do realize that the missile site in Poland isn’t much farther from Russia than Cuba is from the U.S., right, Condi?

Let’s count a few of our many foreign policy blessings in the Dummy Years, shall we?

• Seeing Putin’s soul
• 9/11, 9/11, 9/11
• Tora Bora, Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistan I.S.I.
• Bombing wedding parties while paying bounties for cab drivers.
• Axis of Evil
• Ignoring Iran’s help in Afghanistan and their overtures to the U.S.
• Guantanamo
• Holding hands with the Saudi monarch
• Iraq
• Curveball
• Ahmed Chalabi
• Looting explosives and antiquities is fine; touch the Oil Ministry and die.
• Let’s appoint a viceroy!
• What’s the difference between Sunnis and Shiites again?
• Abu Ghraib
• “No weapons of mass destruction under here.”
• Giving Angela Merkel a backrub
• North Korea gets nukes!
• We push the Palestinians hold elections, and - shocking! - they elect Hamas.
• We cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority after the election of Hamas.
• Turning a blind eye on Russia
• Refusing foreign aid for New Orleans
• Israeli incursion into Lebanon
• Ignoring Cuban reforms under Raoul Castro
• Convincing Georgian president Saakashvili that we’ve got his back
• Making the U.S. entirely impotent on the world stage

…and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

While I know the defense industry is itching for another war to keep the gravy train rolling, after 50+ years of this isn’t it time to stop the madness? Can’t we all just decide that these motherfuckers have killed enough of us - both the Bushes and Putins of the world and their backers at Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and Hughes Aircraft? After all, there are more of us than there are of them - as the Russians proved once upon a time.

It’s time to democratically remove the warmongers from power once and for all, and use our money to feed, shelter, build and heal, not to kill, burn and destroy.

That means you, too, John McCain: