Back in the USSR

President Vladamir Putin has decided to resume permanent flights of bombers armed with nuclear weapons. These flights ended for both the USSR and the US during the presidency of the elder Bush. For years, they had been part of the triad concept of nuclear deterrence, along with submarine-based weapons and those in fixed missile silos.

TPM has a very interesting and spot-on take regarding this development. It is very much worth reading. I'll quote one portion here since it is good, scary food for thought.

What is not debatable however is that there is more going on in the world -- more opportunities and more threats -- than what happens in the few hundred mile radius around the ancient capital of Baghdad. There is, as we can see, Russia, which still has a few thousand nuclear warheads which could cause some serious headaches. There's China, a vast economic and potential military power that will bulk larger and larger in our lives over the course of this century. There's Pakistan, India, half a billion people to our south speaking Spanish and Portuguese. The list goes on and on.

But our whole national dialog, hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot more are going to Iraq. And more generally the fantasy 450 year long-war epic battle with the Islamofascists. We're close to breaking the US Army and Marine Corps with over-extended deployments. And in hotspots around the world, there's a vacuum, as the world sort of rushes past us. In many ways this is the greatest danger in Iraq, not that our future as a nation is at stake in staying (as the right would have it) or even that it's necessarily at stake in leaving but that our engagement with the country has fixed us with a dangerous national myopia which is letting many other problems fester unattended for going on a decade.

17 August 2007