Russia's sleight of Hand....

Russia's sleight of Hand....

Speaking at press conference in Madrid on Tuesday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said that it was “not productive” to link talks over a U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) system in Europe with the perceived security threat from Israel rather than Iran, as proposed by Washington.

The topic came up while Medvedev stood beside Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero at a press conference about a slew of unrelated topics. The question Medvedev answered seemed to come out of left field, suggesting that the Kremlin planted the question, and perhaps the journalist...which is the way Americans do all the time.... The question concerned a secret letter exchange between U.S. President Barack Obama and Medvedev — an exchange that was only made public in a leak to The New York Times on Tuesday....

For the Russians, a quid pro quo simply is unacceptable. It isn’t because the Russians have heightened sensibilities — they are the masters of linking otherwise unrelated topics together for discussion and action — but because they are thinking much bigger these days. They want a grand bargain with the Americans, and they want it now....because they know damn well what's up the sleeves of the Americans and their stooges Netanyahu and Sarkozy....while Lieberman enjoys the limelight and the covert Russian links.....The militarization of energy security will have to work both ways...for Russia and America...otherwise, a war will be in the offing...

Ever since it became clear in late 2003 that the American war in Iraq would serve as more of a sandbag than a springboard for U.S. policy, the Russians have enjoyed the light streaming in through a window of opportunity. Pretty much all U.S. ground forces are spoken for by the Iraqi and Afghan wars. Even if both wars were declared over today, it would be more than two years before all forces could be withdrawn, rested and re-equipped for future deployments. U.S. expeditionary capability is currently limited to the Air Force and naval aviation — hardly small fry, especially when you are on the receiving end, but these tools are not particularly useful for blocking Russian moves in states that were part and parcel of the Soviet Union like Ukraine or Georgia. Blocking such actions can only be done with ground forces, and those forces simply are not available right now....except for the ongoing militarization of Energy security for the USA.

Thus, from the Russian perspective, the time to negotiate with the Americans about the broad spectrum of relations is now. They do not want a short list of quid pro quos that will let the Americans push off the bigger issues until another day.... They want everything — and they mean everything — settled now, when their power is at a relative high as compared to the imploding United States.

The Russians do not want a simple refiguring of existing disarmament treaties; they want fundamentally new ones that extend the current nuclear parity with the United States, codifying it to the finest detail possible. They want to shoot down the plans for BMD, a technology that could one day render the Russian nuclear deterrent obsolete. They want the United States to publicly recognize Russian dominance throughout the former Soviet Union, and — again, publicly — put an end to Western military, political and economic encroachment into Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia....and a piece of the pie in the ongoing militarization of Energy security worldwide...

Part of the ability to get such a grand bargain at such a fortuitous time, of course, is to convince the other side that one’s tools are even more robust than they may seem. One must convince the other side that one’s rise to power is inevitable. It comes to shaping perceptions, and in this the Russians are peerless....

Remember Cold War American propaganda? It was certainly on parade in Spain, not just in the shaping of a press conference where the quid pro quo comments garnered such attention, but in a phalanx of “deals” that the Russian delegation signed...

Most notable was a supposedly iron-clad natural gas swap deal between Russian state energy firm Gazprom and Spain’s Repsol. Under the deal Repsol would gain access to Russian production sites in exchange for Russian access to the Spanish retail market. The centerpiece of the deal was to be liquefied natural gas (LNG), which will come from the offshore Shtokman field. Again the message was dramatic: Even European states who do not currently receive Russian energy are lining up to get access! There is one glitch: Shtokman is a pipe dream. Gazprom possesses neither offshore nor LNG expertise. Shtokman will only be realized if Gazprom pays someone to develop it — and that certainly isn’t going to happen during a global credit crunch, manufactured by the occult forces in the US of America....

Not to be outdone, the Russian state press had its own response to the New York Times leak on the quid pro quo of BMD for Israel. Editorials expounded that there was no deal to be had because the Russians had already suspended their plans to deploy nuclear-tipped Iskandar missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Since the Russians had unilaterally declared such, there was no need for BMD, but there is a great need for the piece of the pie in the ongoing militarization of Energy security globally...

This issue is primarily one of fine print. While the Iskandars have been tested, there is no evidence that any have actually been deployed — to Kaliningrad or elsewhere — and even less evidence that the Russians have figured out how to mate a nuclear warhead to the missiles. Put simply, the Russian “concession” sounds great to the untrained ear — no nukes in Europe — but the Iskandars are not yet a reality, much less a bargaining chip....and this is the beauty of the energy chess game.

Propaganda and disinformation are as much part of the American negotiating package as its nuclear capabilities and Latin American populist movements. USA never really abandoned the tool, but STRATFOR has always participated daily with such aggressive message planting for quite 2 decades.... Then again, the stakes haven’t been this high in a while....and Stratfor is the CIA tool of disinformation par excellence, Texas funded and Texas based, intelligence never provided except for the stupid and gullible who is willing to pay for such garbage...or willing to publish it for pure propaganda purposes worldwide.......http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Oil.htm.