Only George W. Bush Could Work So Hard To ReStart The Cold War

With all the press the last few days about how Bush - who once infamously informed us that he had looked into former KGB superspy and now Russian president Vladimir Putin's heart and discerned it was "good" - is feuding with Putey-put (Bush's nickname for him), my biggest question is why it took the American press so damned long to notice.

For several years now, Putin has been warning the U.S. that he would not be the same lapdog for Bush as was Not-So-Great Britain's Tony Blair had been, which may explain why Blair is out but Putin's enjoying better-than-ever popularity in his own part of the world. Putin was against U.S. involvement in Iraq and has stated fervently that Russia would not just sit back and watch Bush go after Iran. On top of that, Russia was forced to write off HUGE amounts of money owed Russia from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

But let's be clear about one thing. Despite all the talk since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cold war did not magically end that day. It couldn't, not with the massive amounts of profit the military industrial complex has made and will still make. If anything, the cold war has morphed into a much larger entity, one whose face isn't always Eastern European. We also perhaps have never seen a president like Bush so horrifically eager to wage war for ego alone (but his friends, of course, profit wildly from his ego).

Let me also point you to Words of Power, a blog I just happened upon, and their specific piece about the Cold War's thaw.