Once Again, George Bush Has Betrayed Us
Filed under: Russia
Some time ago, we warned of the need to take aggressive steps to block Russia, which can't produce enough of the stuff on its own, from getting unfettered access to Australian "yellowcake" uranium.
In the event, not only did the U.S. government fail to oppose Australia inking a deal with Russia, it issued statements of lukewarm support, and the deal with the government of John Howard went through. As Steve Shalhorn, chief executive of the Australian arm of Greenpeace, observed, even if Russia keeps its promise not to use the uranium for warlike purposes "the primary danger is that supplying Australian uranium to Russian nuclear plants, it frees up Russia to do whatever it pleases with its own deposits." That's to say nothing, of course, of the sheer idiocy of trusting a proud KGB spy and professional liar to keep his word. As The Australian reported: "Russian journalist Grigory Pasko, once jailed for revealing that Russia was illegally dumping radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan, said Australia could not accept Russia's guarantees, despite it having signed the NPT."
As blogger Robert Amsterdam has noted, "Mr Putin stands shoulder to shoulder with Iran. I don't believe for a moment that Australian uranium will be used for totally peaceful purposes." Amsterdam also points out that the deal is fundamentally anti-democratic not only because Russia is one of the world's leading anti-democratic forces but because a clear majority of the Australian people themselves opposed the deal.
Russia has recently embarked upon an outrageous practice of launching nuclear bombers on threatening flight plans near NATO states (the U.S., Canada Norway and Great Britain have all been buzzed, trying to probe NATO defenses and intimidate its populations, leading them to scramble fighters to ward off the threat), while no such gestures are being made by NATO towards Russia. It's clear that Russia wants a new cold war, and yet what we are seeing from the Bush administration, which could easily have quashed this deal if it had wished to do so, is nothing short of the enabling of dictatorship and undermining U.S. security. Bush betrayed us at the very start by "looking into the eyes" of Putin and finding him to have a trustworthy soul rather than by leading the world in opposition to his rise, and Bush's outrageous policies towards Russia have continued to include even inviting Russian war criminals into the White House for photo ops. With each day that passes Bush makes it more and more impossible for those of us who would otherwise support him to do anything other than back away, consigning his presidency to the dustbin of failure. It says something quintessentially sad about our times that a yahoo from Greenpeace is a more effective spokesman for democracy and American national security than the President of the United States.
We can only pray that the coming change of stewardship in the Oval Office will bring forth a true leader with enough vision not to walk down the same path already trodden so ingloriously by such figures as Neville Chamberlain.
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