This is a link to a rather long article: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ENG20070220&articleId=4873
Many on this board have thrown out Bible Prophesy along with the Watchtower. Even the Watchtower has stepped away from identifying the New King of the North. I have never stopped thinking that Russia is the King of the North for reasons I have stated in several posts.
If you are sincerely interested in this topic the above article is a MUST READ.
Here are a few samples:
The frank words of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to the assembled participants of the annual Munich Wehrkunde security conference have unleashed a storm of self-righteous protest from Western media and politicians. A visitor from another planet might have the impression that the Russian President had abruptly decided to launch a provocative confrontation policy with the West reminiscent of the 1943-1991 Cold War.
However, the details of the developments in NATO and the United States military policies since 1991 are anything but ‘déjà vu all over again’, to paraphrase the legendary New York Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra.
This time round we are already deep in a New Cold War, which literally threatens the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq, or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear pre-emptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison to what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Republic of Russia in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin’s frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense.
Missile Defense and a US Nuclear First Strike
On January 29 US Army Brigadier General Patrick J. O`Reilly, Deputy Director of the Pentagon`s Missile Defense Agency, announced US plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile defense elements in Europe by 2011, which the Pentagon claims is aimed at protecting American and NATO installations from enemy threats coming from the Middle East, not Russia. Following Putin’s Munich remarks, the US State Department issued a formal comment noting that the Bush Administration is ‘puzzled by the repeated caustic comments about the envisaged system from Moscow.’
Oops…Better send that press release back to the Pentagon’s Office of Deception Propaganda for rewrite. The Iran missile threat to NATO installations in Poland somehow isn’t quite convincing. Why not ask long-time NATO member Turkey if the US can place its missile shield there, far closer to Iran? Or maybe Kuwait? Or Israel?
For the Pentagon and the US policy establishment, regardless of political party, the Cold War with Russia never ended. It merely continued in disguised form. This has been the case with Presidents G.H.W. Bush, William Clinton and with George W. Bush.
Washington’s obsession with Nuclear Primacy
What Washington did not say, but Putin has now alluded to in Munich, is that the US missile defense is not at all defensive. It is offensive, and how.
The possibility of providing a powerful state, one with the world’s most awesome military machinery, a shield to protect it from limited attack, is aimed directly at Russia, the only other nuclear power with anywhere the capacity to launch a credible nuclear counterpunch.
Were the United States able to effectively shield itself from a potential Russian response to a US nuclear First Strike, the US would be able simply to dictate to the entire world on its terms, not only to Russia. That would be what military people term Nuclear Primacy. That is the real meaning of Putin’s unusual speech. He isn’t paranoid. He’s being starkly realistic.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, it’s now clear that the US Government has never for a moment stopped its pursuit of Nuclear Primacy. For Washington and the US elites, the Cold War never ended. They just forgot to tell us all.
Global Strike: Pentagon Conplan 8022
The march towards possible nuclear catastrophe by intent or by miscalculation, as a consequence of the bold new Washington policy, took on significant new gravity in June 2004, only weeks after the 49 generals and admirals took the highly unusual step of writing to their President.
That June, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld approved a Top Secret order for the Armed Forces of the United States to implement something called Conplan 8022, ‘which provides the President a prompt, global strike capability.’
The term, Conplan, is Pentagon shorthand for Contingency Plan. What ‘contingencies’ are Pentagon planners preparing for? A pre-emptive conventional strike against tiny North Korea or even Iran? Or a full-force pre-emptive nuclear assault on the last formidable nuclear power not under the thumb of the US’ Full Spectrum Dominance-- Russia?
The two words, ‘global strike’, are also notable. It’s Pentagon-speak to describe a specific pre-emptive attack which, for the first time since the earliest Cold War days, includes a nuclear option, counter to the traditional US military notion of nuclear weapons being only used in defense to deter attack.
Conplan 8022, as has been noted by some, is unlike traditional Pentagon war plans which have been essentially defensive responses to invasion or attack.
In concert with the aggressive pre-emptive 2002 Bush Doctrine, Bush’s new Conplan 8022 is offensive. It could be triggered by the mere ‘perception’ of an imminent threat, and carried out by Presidential order, without Congress.
Given the details about false or faked ‘perceptions’ in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President about Iraq’s threat of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the new Conplan 8022 suggests a US President might order the missiles against any and every perceived threat or even potential, unproven threat.
In response to Rumsfeld’s June 2004 order, General Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed the order to make Conplan 8022 operational. Selected nuclear-capable bombers, ICBMs, SSBNs, and ‘information warfare’ (sic) units have been deployed against unnamed high-value targets in ‘adversary’ countries.
Was Iran an adversary country, even though it had never attacked the United States? Was North Korea, even though it had never in five decades launched a direct attack on South Korea, let alone any one else? Is China an ‘adversary’ because it’s simply becoming economically too influential?
Is Russia now an adversary because she refuses to lay back and accept being made what Brzezinski terms a ‘vassal’ state of the American Empire?
Mackinder’s Nightmare
In a few brief years Washington has managed to create the nightmare of Britain’s father of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, the horror scenario feared by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and other Cold War veterans of US foreign policy who have studied and understood the power calculus of Mackinder.
The vast resources-rich and population-rich Eurasian Heartland and landmass is building economic and military ties with one another for the first time in history, ties whose driving force is the increasingly aggressive Washington role in the world.
The driver of the emerging Eurasian geopolitical cooperation is obvious. China, with the world’s largest population and an economy expanding at double digits, urgently needs secure alliance partners who could secure her energy security. Russia, an energy goliath, needs secure trade outlets independent of Washington control to develop and rebuild its tattered economy. These complimentary needs form the seed crystal of what Washington and US strategists define as a new Cold War, this one over energy, over oil and natural gas above all. Military might is the currency this time as in the earlier Cold War.
By 2006 Moscow and Beijing had clearly decided to upgrade their cooperation with their Eurasian neighbors. They both agreed to turn to a moribund loose organization that they had co-founded in 2001, in the wake of the 1998 Asia crisis, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO. The SCO had highly significant members, geopolitically seen. SCO included oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as China and Russia. By 2006 Beijing and Moscow began to view the SCO as a nascent counterweight to increasingly arbitrary American power politics. The organization was discussing projects of energy cooperation and even military mutual defense.
The pressures of an increasingly desperate US foreign policy are forcing an unlikely ‘coalition of the unwilling’ across Eurasia. The potentials of such Eurasian cooperation between China, Kazakhstan, Iran are real enough and obvious. The missing link, however, is the military security that could make it invulnerable or nearly, to the sabre-rattling from Washington and NATO. Only one power on the face of the earth has the nuclear and military base and know-how able to provide that—Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Etc. etc.
The above paragraphs are just selections to show the basic idea. The original article is 11 pages of small print.