America's top arms control diplomat, John Bolton, recently left Moscow in defeat. For two days he begged the Kremlin to curtail its nuclear assistance to Iran. The Kremlin told him not to waste his breath. Russia is determined to help Iran build a nuclear power plant. Now here is a question for the inquisitive: Why would a country that is floating on oil need nuclear power? After all, nuclear power is comparatively expensive. So what is Tehran aiming at? Here is another question: Why would Russia want to help Iran develop nuclear power? There is only one logical answer. Russia would like to expand the threat posed by regimes hostile to the United States (regimes like Iran).
This week George Jahn of the Associated Press reported that U.N. inspectors have "found traces of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium at an Iranian nuclear facility...." Iranian officials say that the equipment, shipped from Russia, came packaged that way -- sprinkled with particles of enriched uranium. Let us admit the plausibility of this explanation. But consider the profound admission that it contains. If traces of enriched uranium have been found on equipment shipped to Iran, then the equipment has evidently been used in the processing of weapons-grade uranium. The implication is clear. Thanks to Russia, Iran now possesses equipment used in processing weapons-grade uranium.
Some atomic energy officials privately believe that Russia has assisted North Korea's nuclear weapons program. The nasty regime in Pyongyang already has a couple of nuclear bombs and promises to build dozens more. Of course, Russia is supposed to be our ally in the Far East. Look at the outward show the Kremlin makes, and the explanations the Kremlin offers, to belie any and all suspicion. Playing the part of America's ally, concerned for North Korea's stability, Russia's Pacific Fleet has been engaged in a massive military exercise.
The present exercises involve surface vessels, submarines, naval air forces, marines and coastal forces. These maneuvers appear to be a continuation of exercises conducted last May with the Indian Navy in which Russian strategic TU-95MC bombers hit waterborne targets in the Indian Ocean. These strikes were intended to simulate an escalation of regional tensions into a world war. In terms of air operations Russian sources admitted: "The air strikes did - in what certainly is a signal on the global strategic level - rehearse nuclear strikes against targets in the USA and UK, especially the search for liquidation of the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier shock groups."
We read the following excerpt from Pravda: "During the [August] exercises, the Russian troops will work on a complex of training missions aimed at disabling the U.S. orbital group of space satellites. This is important to break the stable functioning of the NAVSTAR global positioning system, the optoelectronic prospecting satellites Keyhole, and the radar reconnaissance satellites LaCross."
Pravda also noted, "that under conditions of war, these actions may blind the Pentagon and interfere with its usage of high-precision weapons against Russia's armed forces."
In the Western press, Russia's Pacific maneuvers have been depicted as a supportive gesture aimed at North Korea. But in reality the Russian exercises are aimed at combating American ships and troops. Should a crisis in Korea lead to a widened war, Russia will not fight on America's side. It will fight on the side of Asian communism. This is the context in which we are to understand Russia's role in offering nuclear and other WMD assistance to America's enemies.
The recent statements of the Romanian defector, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, are highly instructive in this regard. In an August 21 Washington Times editorial, Pacepa explained that Russia was behind Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Russia set up Iraq's WMD programs, and Russia has taken the lead in hiding these programs if only to mask its own involvement. "As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction," wrote Pacepa.
Here is the key to the global WMD problem. As Pacepa noted, "The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction - in Romanian it was codenamed 'Sarindar,' meaning 'emergency exit.'" The idea was to rid collapsing client states of all trace of WMDs so that U.S. forces would find nothing. "We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us," Pacepa wrote, "and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with."
During Pacepa's tenure as a Romania's spy chief, WMD support was going to Libya. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed," Pacepa explained. "Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day."
And so they do. The international communist movement that supposedly went belly-up in 1991 yet remains in place, behind countless left-wing front groups. It performs its traditional function without meeting anti-communist opposition, which has all but dried up. Americans need to know that the organizational core of the anti-war movement at home and abroad is leftist and communist-dominated. Pacepa tells us that the Soviet bloc relied on the radical left to organize "large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's war-mongering whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored."
Little has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia still prepares for a future world war with America. The Kremlin still arms America's enemies with weapons of mass destruction. The same leftist radicals serve up the same big lie. Did the Bush administration deceive the American people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Pacepa believes that Iraq had its own "Sarindar" plan for evacuating its WMDs in advance of the U.S. invasion. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption. But today we are treated to a drumbeat in the press, on television and elsewhere, accusing the United States of imperial self-aggrandizement. We are told that the Bush administration lied to the American people. We are told that the war wasn't about mass destruction weapons. It was about oil. How many times in a week does the average American hear this accusation against the government? "The United States won a brilliant military victory," noted Pacepa, "demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun losing the peace." The big lie has taken hold in Europe and the rest of the world. Future American aggressions are predicted. Meanwhile, Russia continues its treacherous schemes in the Far East where the North Koreans have thumbed their nose at the U.S., promising to produce nuclear weapons like sausages.
The game that Russia is playing should be obvious to everyone.
