Cold War

I don't know about you, but I miss the Cold War. Life was simpler when Russia was all in one piece and our only serious enemy. When the Chinese kept themselves behind locked doors and didn't deal with anybody. When there was an Iron Curtain and you were either behind it or not. True, we spent the Cold War always on the cusp of Armageddon. Nuclear annihilation was possible at any moment, and that can be stressful. But there was comfort in knowing that if you crawled under your desk at school, you'd be fine.

Now that Vladimir Putin is Russia's president once again, the result of still another fraudulent election, we should expect ever more hostile relations with Moscow. Mr. Putin, a vain and vulgar man, was born and bred to despise the United States. And in recent times, Washington has given him little reason to change his mind. The latest example: President Obama waited several days before calling Mr. Putin to congratulate him on his election victory this month - though Mr. Obama did manage to call Francois Hollande just a few hours after he won the French presidential elections.

The recent arrest of 10 Russian citizens in America on charges of espionage at first blush appears to be a typical Cold War scenario. But it clearly is not. Human intelligence operations are uniquely equipped to ascertain an enemy's intentions. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union ran extensive intelligence operations against the United States. They targeted just about any American they could, many of whom were insignificant employees of the U.S. Government and members of the armed forces.

Weapons-makers, ideologues and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are busy whipping up fears in reaction to scheduled reductions in our bloated military budget. Don't be fooled. These cuts will not put our security at risk, though they will cut into profits and executive pay at certain defense-establishment corporations. In this time of debilitating unemployment and financial disaster, our slavish devotion to military spending undercuts our opportunity to rebuild America. Military expenditures have doubled in constant dollars since 2001.

Soviet capacity to launch a quick, massive attack with non-nuclear forces in Central Europe will disappear in a mountain of scrapped military equipment under the most comprehensive disarmament treaty ever negotiated.More than 19,000 Soviet tanks, 30,000 heavy artillery pieces and 10,000 armored personnel carriers are likely to be dismantled. What's left of the once-mighty Warsaw Pact military machine, which in the end succeeded only in weakening Soviet bloc economies, will be subjected to international monitoring to foreclose future aggression.

Dallas -- THERE MAY APPEAR to be no relationship between the end of the Cold War, Oklahoma City, Chechnya and Islamic fundamentalist violence. I can hear the skeptical reader asking: "Have you been smoking something, Ms. Geyer?"Well, before you stop reading and continue to be confused about the horrors of Oklahoma City, let me quote some insightful words from Don Edward Beck and Chris Cowan, two fine young analysts of the social psychology of groups and nations of our times:"This is an extremely dangerous time.

LOSE Boris Yeltsin, lose the peace dividend.From Richard Nixon on down, commentators treat the prospect of higher defense spending as the clinching argument for increasing Western aid to Russia. Secretary of State Warren Christopher made the same case Monday in his speech before '' the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.Yet the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later choice they and others pose less hard-boiled analysis than wishful thinking and it reflects a failure to imagine the immense problems that will flow from the failure of Russian democracy.

Washington -- Several groups of seasoned technocrats with exemplary credentials have recently urged the federal government to get out of the Cold War rut and redeploy its formidable research resources to the commercial wars that threaten the American economy.The Bush administration has responded with a virtuoso performance in foot-dragging that still gives defense more than 60 percent of Washington's research and development funds. No other government comes near that percentage in allocating R&D money between commercial and military objectives.

During the Cold War, the world seemed a dangerously violent place. It remains so. Last week, Russia bombed hostage-taking rebels on the fringes of Chechnya, a coup toppled the president of Sierra Leone, and a militia in Liberia slaughtered civilians and members of a peacekeeping force. Below is a summary of the conflicts - some of them one-time explosions, others simmering for decades - with the potential to change the map of the world.AfghanistanCivil war erupted in 1992, when guerrilla groups overran Communists installed by the former Soviet Union.

WASHINGTON -- The CIA has decided to release thousands of files on its most politically charged Cold War operations, including the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the overthrow of the president of Guatemala in 1954 and the 1953 coup that installed Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi of Iran, government officials said.The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agency would make public historically significant files on every major covert operation from 1950 through 1963. The files should be released by next year, they said.

As defense strategists at the Pentagon carry out their review of how to make roughly $400 billion in cuts over 10 years, and Congress considers the possibility of reductions twice as large as required by the supercommittee's failure to reach agreement, one clear change in policy is appropriate: It is time to drop the longstanding assumption that U.S. ground forces must be capable of fighting two overlapping regional wars. Rather, ground-force planners should adopt a "1+2" framework, planning for one major war together with two smaller (but perhaps longer)

Yeats warned nearly a century ago in his chilling poem, "The Second Coming," that "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. " He said, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. " The Irish poet was writing in the immediate aftermath of World War I, the European war of all against all that some of us regard as the beginning of the end for Western civilization. Still, even after World War II — in truth a resumption of the first one, with Asia brought into play — and the Cold War, which ended with the Soviet Empire in pieces, the West stood on top of the heap.

For the past few days, I've watched commentators on both the left and the right examine and analyze the reaction of the "American street" to the news of the death of Osama bin Laden. Many of those who gathered at the White House and other places of national significance have been college and university students. It is an error to compare these spontaneous demonstrations with those in the Arab world following the attacks of 9/11 or to insinuate that such demonstrations by young people were simply expressions of over-excited youth.

I don't know about you, but I miss the Cold War. Life was simpler when Russia was all in one piece and our only serious enemy. When the Chinese kept themselves behind locked doors and didn't deal with anybody. When there was an Iron Curtain and you were either behind it or not. True, we spent the Cold War always on the cusp of Armageddon. Nuclear annihilation was possible at any moment, and that can be stressful. But there was comfort in knowing that if you crawled under your desk at school, you'd be fine.

Indie rockers the Cold War Kids have never spent too much time recording an album. So when the band set out to record a full-length follow up to 2008's "Loyalty to Loyalty," they wanted to have a couple of months to tinker with the songs. Earlier this year, the band went into a Nashville, Tenn., studio and recorded about half the still-untitled album. Then they took a three-month break to nitpick the tunes while their producer, Jacquire King, worked with Kings of Leon. The Cold War Kids play Artscape Saturday.

The recent arrest of 10 Russian citizens in America on charges of espionage at first blush appears to be a typical Cold War scenario. But it clearly is not. Human intelligence operations are uniquely equipped to ascertain an enemy's intentions. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union ran extensive intelligence operations against the United States. They targeted just about any American they could, many of whom were insignificant employees of the U.S. Government and members of the armed forces.

For an excursion through warped priorities, look at the Bush administration's plans for the billions of dollars the federal government will spend next year on research and development.From no less an authority than President Bush, the Cold War is over, the gulf war is expected to be brief, and the major long-term challenge facing America is industrial competitiveness. Science and technology, he has repeatedly said, are indispensable ingredients of our economic strength. So, guess what? Defense is budgeted for 60 percent of all the money Washington will spend on R&D next year.

Although a substantial success for several decades after its 1868 premiere, the grand opera version of "Hamlet" by Ambroise Thomas fell into neglect, even in the composer's home country of France. To paraphrase one of Hamlet's lines from the Shakespeare original: How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seemed all the uses of this opera. But recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Thomas' "Hamlet" on both sides of the Atlantic. A couple of months ago, the piece returned to the stage of New York's Metropolitan Opera after an absence of 113 years.

As we hovered over the poppy field in the volatile Helmand province of southern Afghanistan — a square patch of earth unremarkable for its rows of small cabbage-green plants in the furrowed soil — the pilot of the low-flying U.S. gunship told me, "We can land here if you'd like to take some notes and a few photos. You've got two minutes." "Why two minutes?" I asked. "Because," he replied evenly, " al-Qaida's guarding these fields." "Two minutes will be fine, sir."