I Know, Let's Get The Whole World Mad At Us

January 2009 really can't come too soon, and it may be too late. It's bad enough that this Administration ignored its allies and pushed through into a disaster in Iraq, a disaster they'd like to prolong for the next 50 years. Apparently they want to reconstitute the Cold War as well, restarting conflict with China and Russia.

Apparently the idea before 9-11 was to push Taiwan toward independence and provoke a shooting war with the largest country on the planet.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson’s account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials....

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

This would be literally unsane (the opposite of sane), but the neoconservative project has always been predicated on finding an enemy, and after the Cold War ended they were openly looking for a new enemy until 9-11 cemented the question.

Not only were these provocations made with respect to China, but currently, Russia is being provoked mightily over installing new missile defense sites in Eastern Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe would force Moscow to target its weapons against Europe.

The threat, in an interview published Sunday in Italy's Corriere della Sera and other foreign media, marked one of Putin's most strident statements to date against the U.S. plans and came just days before he is to join President Bush and other leaders at a Group of Eight summit in Germany.

In the interview, Putin was asked whether the proposed missile defense shield would compel Moscow to direct its own missiles at locations and U.S. military sites in Europe, as during the Cold War.

"If the American nuclear potential grows in European territory, we have to give ourselves new targets in Europe," Putin said, according to Corriere. "It is up to our military to define these targets, in addition to defining the choice between ballistic and cruise missiles."

I didn't think it was possible to get worse, to actually combine all of the accumulated threats of the 20th century at the same time. Is there somebody shouting in the beer halls in Bavaria as well, talking about a putsch?

This is a terrible development. We know Putin has been consolidating power into a very anti-democratic model, and now he's pointing missiles at Western Europe again. So the difference between him and, say, Leonid Brezhnev, is what, exactly?

There are days like this where I want to crawl into the cushions of my couch and hide for 18 months.

UPDATE: Mikhail Gorbachev:

The former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has blamed the US for the current state of relations between Russia and the West.

In a BBC interview, Mr Gorbachev said that the Russians were ready to be constructive, but America was trying to squeeze them out of global diplomacy [...]

In an interview with Radio Four's The World This Weekend, Mr Gorbachev said relations between Russia and the West were in a bad state.

"Well, it's worse than I expected," he said through a translator.

"We lost 15 years after the end of the Cold War, but the West I think and particularly the United States, our American friends, were dizzy with their success, with the success of their game that they were playing, a new empire.

"I don't understand why you, the British, did not tell them, 'Don't think about empire, we know about empires, we know that all empires break up in the end, so why start again to create a new mess.'"

There are a lot of reasons for going into Iraq, but empire-building is almost certainly one of them. A new kind of empire, to be sure, but empire nonetheless, one where the arms of military and economic power have influence worldwide.