“RUSSIA, RUSSIA, AND RUSSIA”
October 3, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The ingredients are coming in place for Russia to come down for a piece of control of the oil pie at the last great battle of Armageddon, when the Arab nations will attack to finally eliminate the Israeli remnant forever, after she has been in the Negev for some three and one-half years. I think it likely that the initial attack by the ten Islamic nation, which drives Israel into the Negev, where she will remain for some three and one-half years, is likely to occur at some point in time between 2010 and the end of 2014, with the final battle of Armageddon occurring at the end of the three and one-half years.
Begin Article from International Herald Tribune
POLITICUS
October 1, 2007
By John Vinocur
ASSESSING RUSSIA’S PLANS WITH A RARE FORTITUDE
MORA, Sweden
The nervous-making answer is “Russia, Russia and Russia.” As for the question, up here in a cautious but less complacent Nordic world, it no longer takes an oafish outlander to ask it in public:
What’s my country’s biggest security challenge?
Rattling off the R-word three times in succession – get it, get it, get it
? – Jyri Hakamies, the defense minister of Finland, broke last month with his country’s traditionally monumental circumspection in avoiding talk that might discomfort its huge and recurrently assertive neighbor.
For a marker showing how much Russia has become a locus of trouble in Europe’s mind, and the effect of its retreat from post Soviet-era hopes that it would become a country of democratic inklings and moderate ambitions, the Finn’s assessment stands out like a watchtower in a birch forest.
While President George
W. Bush ducks America’s head, letting Russia run interference for Iran in the UN Security Council, or run around the council with a veto threat to block approval of Kosovo’s independence, a remarkable gauge of Russia’s new reality is coming from countries living close enough by to feel its potential for intimidation.
In Oslo, a leaked report to local media last week from the chief of the country’s armed forces contemplates a situation in which Russia’s drive for oil, gas and fishery resources would challenge Norway – without much help to be expected from NATO in the event of “serious conflict.”
General Sverre Diesen was quoted as saying that no danger of war existed, “but there are gray zones.”
In Sweden, the conservative government’s defense minister has quit, complaining its planned cuts in defense spending were intolerable.
I asked a Swedish security expert, who favors Sweden abandoning neutrality for NATO membership, to evaluate developments like 18 incursions over the last five months by Russian bombers into Norwegian air space (requiring Norwegian jet fighters to respond), and Moscow’s new claims to territorial rights in the Arctic alongside those of Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States.
He hunted for a balanced-sounding reply.
This was it: “We’re in a new era of geopolitics. You can’t pretend otherwise.”
But the Finnish defense minister reached for another register in a speech in Washington in September.
By European standards of accommodating Russia – over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration’s agreement to delay pressing for new UN sanctions against Iran was “a concession” to Germany as well
as Russia and China – Hakamies offered a bold, no-illusions approach.
He asked himself rhetorically what Finland’s security situation was really like in what’s normally considered one of the world’s safe corners. His answer:
“The three main security challenges for Finland today are Russia, Russia and Russia. And not only for Finland, but for all of us.
“According to the Russian world view,” Hakamies said, “military force is a key element in how it conducts its international relations.”
While it would be foolish and mistaken to conclude that Russia will threaten Finland, he said, “we who have the responsibility for Finland’s national defense have to draw certain conclusions.”
Ah, conclusions. Hakamies was offering one in calling Russia out by name. And three times, to good effect.
This is uncomfortable, non-instinctive stuff in a country like Finland with so much of its complex Cold War history spent avoiding displeasing Russia.
It was so unconventional that the prime minister chided Hakamies for his “unsuccessful” choice of words.
Not accidentally, Hakamies also gave wide berth to anything sounding like the current mantra, which says that Russia needs respect and to be washed of all its past humiliations.
He didn’t say it, of course, but the fact is that in cash terms these days, the West gives Russia all the respect it can handle, while its humiliations are mostly of its own making.
The question of conclusions really goes beyond the Nordic world to its friends in bigger countries.
But who among them, like Hakamies and General Diesen of Norway, will talk straight on Russia, recognizing, as the Finn did, that the hard-edged Russian notion of the great game is “is back, and it is back in force”?
Not George Bush. In spite of warnings from places like the State Department that Russia seeks to weaken and humiliate the United States, he does not seem willing to add his relationship with Vladimir Putin to the pile of his failed judgments.
Nicolas Sarkozy? In a little more than a week, the French president is scheduled to go Moscow to meet with Putin. It’s reasonable to hope that they will hear each other out, and that Sarkozy, who wants France to lead Europe, can continue to talk to and about Russia with the frankness that has made him a man apart.
There are encouraging signs.
Sarkozy, in the last weeks, appears to be going after one of the basic untruths in the Russian position protecting Iran. It is Moscow’s persistence in saying it has no evidence that the mullahs’ nuclear program has anything other than peaceful intent.
This is the fib that allows Russia, as Iran’s nuclear supplier, the freedom of diplomatic maneuver to delay and play dumb on Tehran’s behalf.
Nobody in the West has tried explicitly to dismantle the Russian bluff.
But that’s the essence of Sarkozy’s asserting the truth when he says, “Iran is trying to get a nuclear bomb,” and that “all the experts from everywhere in world agree that the Iranians are working on nuclear arms.”
In pointing this out twice – a presidential spokesman took care of a third repetition – Sarkozy might as well have been saying to Putin, give the West and
the world the respect of talking honestly.
That matters – on Iran, on agreeing to a charter governing energy supply that would assure Russia’s customers of security, on discussing the Kremlin’s attempt to push old Soviet neighborhoods back into silence or renewed spheres of Russian influence.
If he takes it, Sarkozy will find a wide international constituency for this approach.
Even in Europe’s once-comfy north.
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