Yes it is true that there are huge spy networks working against us, but some of those spies are not from what we consider enemy countries, they are from our closest allies. If they are spying on us, you can be sure that we are also spying on everybody else. Back in the cold war days, it was presumed that the Soviet military was about equal to ours in many ways and even had more missiles armed with nuclear warheads than we did. The threat from China was perceived to be mainly one of manpower. The smaller so called enemy countries, were not much of a threat to us, until certain events came about. Cuba had missiles put in their country by the Soviets and even begged them to use nukes on the U.S. The North Vietnamese were great fighters, but the truth is that if we had wanted to, we could have crushed them in an instant. Just knocking out the dams in that country would have put it under a considerable amount of water. We really had no reason to fight them. The South Vietnamese government was totally corrupt and was selling drugs among other things and this is the government we backed. The North Vietnamese were communists, but they were a different type than those in the Soviet Union and the truth is that we could have backed them and probably had friendly relations with them. To this day, even after everything we did over there, they still want to be our friends.

The Korean war lasted a little over 3 years. Each side of Korea wanted to unify the country under their government. They have called this a civil war, but the truth is that it was also a war between some major powers, those being the U.S., Soviet Union and China. Who knows what the outcome would have been, if it were not for the support of these external countries. What many people don't realize is that the U.S. footed most of the bill for the Korean war. We even paid for many of the troops from our so called allies. I read a story stating that every time we used the South Korean railroads to transport troops we had to pay, it also said that we paid the cost for the uniforms and boots of many of the foreign troops.

Russia

When the cold war ended, it seemed that things would be different in the world. The Soviet Union ripped down the Berlin wall and startled President Reagan who had asked them to do that in a speech. He really never expected this to happen. The Soviet Union became a group of different countries. Russia became a country on it's own and those that joined with Russia became the Russian Federation. The Russian Federation no longer had the military that the old Soviet Union possessed. The navy became mostly a group of rotting ships, the army was selling off it's equipment and the air force was not building many new planes, because they were too expensive and the Russian Federation was struggling. China had lost it's main military supplier and began to construct it's own weapons and stepped up the spying effort on the U.S. to acquire technology. Things became even easier for them when they were sold technology by greedy U.S. companies, which was supposedly against the law.

Into the disruption with the Russian Federation stepped the U.S. Why were we getting into this? Could it have been because there was oil and gas to be had, or was it to tweak the nose of the Russian Federation, or could it have been both? Many think that the reason we invaded Iraq was because President Bush wanted to get even with Saadam Hussein. Could it be that we were getting even with the Russians for some unknown reason? NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Traditionally the members pledge to come to the aid of any nation belonging to NATO that is attacked. Offers of membership were orchestrated by this county to many of the former Soviet Block countries and even some of those that once were part of the old Soviet Union. We must have know how angry this would make Russia, since we were not allowing them to join. At first blush it seems like a nice thing to offer, because it seems to bestow security on some of those militarily weak countries. As a practical matter, it is almost impossible to enforce. If Georgia, which was part of the old Soviet Union, had been a NATO member, we might all be at war right now. Look at the situation. Georgia had two different parts of their country break away from them. They decided to invade one part, a part that was sympathetic to Russia. They had to know that Russia would come to the aid of those people, yet they did it anyway. They took their seven planes and a few tanks they owned and leveled a city in that territory. When the Russians invaded them and assaulted one of their cities they called the Russians aggressors and we stuck up for them. I like the Georgian people, but we certainly had no business getting into this mess. We said we were going to send them medicine and food, sounds nice doesn't it? Why we would we send it to them on a warship, was this supposed to be a message to the Russians?

Look at what we did in Poland. We must have really wanted to anger the Russians, because we have placed missiles in that country right next to the Russian border. Remember how angry we got when the Soviet Union tried to put missiles in Cuba? That is about the equivalent of what we are doing. Oh we play stupid and say things like they are defensive missiles, they protect you also. The truth is we could have put them anywhere, picking Poland was definitely an aggressive act that may cause us much grief in the future. We have also quietly ignored several treaties that we had with the Russians and have denied them participation in our future manned planetary exploration programs. At the time that came as quite a shock to them, they thought that they were going to be equal partners in space exploration with us, because we were cooperating quite a bit at the time with them on this.

Russia has threatened to put missiles back in Cuba. There has also been talk of them putting nukes on their ships. Officially they say that this isn't so, let's hope that is true. It certainly seems that this administration is trying to provoke the Russians, it is almost like we feel that they are an easy mark and too weak to do anything about it.

It is time for a change in policy. We have to have better relations with countries, not worse ones. We shouldn't single out a country and constantly do things that cause our relationships to fail. I can't help but think that many of our current policies are revenge driven and also driven by the opportunity to make huge sums of money and everything else be dammed.