Lee on Aug 15 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web
Iraq is buying 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks, along with wide range of other conventional hardware, as it prepares to shift its focus from internal security to defending the borders in a very hostile neighborhood. Iran, in case you’re wondering, can field approximately 1600 tanks, but mostly of the Soviet iron heap variety that the M1 annihilated in the Gulf War.
Sphere: Related ContentLee on Aug 15 2008 | Filed under: Foreign affairs
(photo: Pavel Trebukov | blog)
From the gang who brought you the “because Georgia has invaded its own country we had to attack” rationale for the South Ossetian War, Poland has now apparently “made itself a target” for Russian nuclear strike, by agreeing to base an entirely defensive missile system which could not possibly repel even a small Russian ballistic missile salvo.
Alas, this preposterous Russian claim like so many others, can find plenty of eager advocates in the West, who believe it is “aggressive” to create a defensive system against an Iranian missile threat, because Russia (!) says her “right” to target a country with ICBMs could be infringed…only to then confess the lie of that, by targeting the country with missiles. It’s an utterly immoral and entirely ludicrous formula on its face; indefensible from every direction.
And such a painfully helpless claim for erasing or even obscuring the fact that it was Russia alone which invaded Georgia, and it is Russia alone which is targeting Poland — and most sadly of all, it is Russia alone which is destroying Yeltsin’s great security achievement of an international framework for peaceful borders between friendly republics. A squandered and priceless inheritance, traded cheaply, in favor of an engineered frontier war for the vanity of militarism.
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