Category Archives: Russia

Arts, History, Russia, Society, Soviet Union, United States

Short Essay: The Start of The ‘Cold War’

(1946-1948)

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR the responsibility for supervising the defeated Germany was divided among the Allied victors. West Germany was occupied by British and American troops, while East Germany was occupied by Russia. Berlin, the capital of Germany, was also divided into East and West, but embedded within East German territory.

On 24 July 1948, Soviet troops set up a blockade, severing the road and rail links between West Germany and Berlin. It was a calculated act of aggression against the West, and was felt as such. The West came close to declaring war on Russia and was only put off by the thought of Stalingrad. In fact, it later turned out that Stalin did not have sufficient troops or equipment in the Russian sector (later East Germany) to launch a war on the British and American sectors (later West Germany). If the British and American troops had fought their way through the Soviet blockade, there would probably have been no further military action from Moscow, but at the time the level of risk was unknown.

The day after the Berlin blockade started an airlift began, with British and US aircraft flying in food and supplies for the people living in West Berlin – some 2million of them. The blockade continued and by September the aircraft were ferrying in 4,500 tons of supplies a day. The blockade was maintained for almost 18 months.

Relations between the West and the Soviet Union naturally cooled over the Berlin blockade. The US Presidential adviser Bernard Baruch described the situation as a “Cold War”, coining the phrase that would characterise the state of the world for the next half-century. The Soviets were not firing guns at anyone, but their behaviour was certainly hostile and intimidating.

This state of frozen hostility went on for over 40 years. It led directly to a dangerous arms race in which the latest atomic weapons were stockpiled. As the science of rocketry developed, America and the Soviet Union equipped their arsenals with rockets and missiles that could carry nuclear warheads right across the Arctic Ocean or from one side of Europe to the other. The cost of these intercontinental ballistic missiles (IBMs) was enormous, a huge drain on the economic resources of the countries involved.

A climate of fear was generated. Both sides wanted to test their latest nuclear bombs, and the bomb test explosions were in themselves intended to deter the enemy. By the late 1950s it was evident that dangerous levels of radiation were being pumped into the atmosphere by these test explosions, and anxious people were concerned their life expectancy was being shortened by the increase risk of serious illness. In the West, there was also a heightened fear that real, full-scale war would break out, a Third World War that might be shorter but far more violent than the two previous world wars, a war that could and probably would destroy both sides.

Perhaps in the knowledge that an old-style military war would probably annihilate everything and everyone, America and the Soviet Union played out their fierce rivalry in a Space Race. The competition to launch satellites, space probes and land men on the Moon was a kind of displacement activity, an acting-out of the Cold War in a contest of supremacy over space technology.

. Appendage

Cold War

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Britain, European Union, National Security, Russia

Putin blasted by MI5 for ‘fog of lies’ over Salisbury

BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

Head of MI5: Andrew Parker

Intro: Andrew Parker speaks out for the first time since the Salisbury nerve agent attack

THE head of MI5, Britain’s intelligence service, has launched an excoriating attack on Russia, accusing Vladimir Putin’s regime of flagrant breaches of international law.

Andrew Parker used his first public speech outside of the UK by taking aim at the Russian president and his “aggressive and pernicious” agenda.

He told European security chiefs the Salisbury poisonings were a deliberate and malign act that could turn Russia into a “more isolated pariah”. He also launched a strident attack on the “fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation” that pours out of Mr Putin’s propaganda machine.

Mr Parker’s speech in Berlin was the first time he has spoken publicly since the attempted assassination in Salisbury of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in March.

The attack, with the Novichok toxin, marked the first use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

The MI5 director-general said that with an unrelenting international terrorist threat and rising state aggression, the UK and Europe need to work together more than ever.

His words are likely to have been interpreted as a warning to Brussels to agree a post-Brexit deal on security cooperation. That has been in growing doubt amid a row over whether Britain will still be allowed to participate in the EU’s multi-billion-pound Galileo global navigation satellite project. But Mr Parker reserved his toughest language for Russia, saying that Mr Putin’s government is pursuing an agenda through aggressive actions by its intelligence services.

He accused the Kremlin of flagrant breaches of international rules, warning that the Salisbury attack was a “deliberate and targeted malign activity”.

Britain’s security agencies are still trying to identify those individuals behind the attack. It is understood there are several persons of interest who are back in Moscow and may have been in the UK at the time of the poisoning.

Mr Parker, who has been head of the security service since 2013, also condemned the unprecedented level of Russian disinformation following the attack, saying it highlights the need “to shine a light through the fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation that pours out of their propaganda machine”.

In the wake of the attack, Theresa May said “Kremlin-inspired” accounts were posting lies as “part of a wider effort to undermine the international system”.

Mr Parker did, however, praise the international response to the incident in his speech which was hosted by Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service.

He noted that 28 European countries agreed to support the UK in expelling scores of Russian diplomats.

In 2017, Mrs May’s national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, said the threat from Moscow was worse than ever imagined. He warned that it was intensifying and diversifying.

 

MR Parker also told EU security leaders in Berlin that Internet giants have an “ethical responsibility” to prevent hostile states spreading a “torrent of lies” online. He said that “bare-faced lying” had become the “default mode” of the Russian state.

He added that there was a “great deal more” that could be done with internet providers to stop the exploitation of the web.

MI5’s director-general said Europe faced sustained hostile activity from states including Russia who he described as the “chief protagonist”.

In his speech, he said: “Age-old attempts at covert influence and propaganda have been supercharged in online disinformation, which can be churned out on a massive scale and at little cost. The aim is to sow doubt by flat denials of the truth, to dilute truth with falsehood, divert attention to fake stories, and do all they can to divide alliances.

“Bare-faced lying seems to be the default mode, coupled with ridicule of critics.”

The Russian state’s now well-practiced doctrine of blending media manipulation, social media disinformation and distortion with new and old forms of espionage, high levels of cyber-attacks, military force and criminal thuggery is what is meant these days by the term “hybrid threats”. Russia’s state media and representatives instigated at least 30 different so-called explanations of the Salisbury poisonings in their efforts to “mislead the world and their own people,” Mr Parker said.

One recent media survey found that two-thirds of social media output at the peak of the Salisbury attack came from Russian government-controlled accounts.

Last October, MI5’s chief said he wanted internet companies to do more to stop extremists using the “safe spaces” on the web to learn illicit techniques such as bomb-making.

This week’s keynote speech was the first time he has called on web giants to do far more. “We are committed to working with them as they look to fulfil their ethical responsibility to prevent terrorist, hostile state and criminal exploitation of internet carried services: shining a light on terrorists; taking down bomb-making instructions; warning the authorities about attempts to acquire explosives precursors.

“This matters and there is much more to do,” the director-general of MI5 said.

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Iran, Israel, Middle East, Russia, Syria, United States

On the brink of a cataclysmic Middle East war?

MIDDLE EAST

Israel Iran

The Middle East is on the brink of a major conflagration. The situation is complex but Russia’s Vladimir Putin could play a significant role in calming tensions. Israeli airstrikes on Iranian targets in Syria has raised the stakes, precipitated some say by Donald Trump’s decision to reverse the 2015 nuclear agreement.

FOR much of 2018 so far, the world has been fixated by fears of nuclear Armageddon erupting in North Korea.

But over the last few days, alarming developments in the Middle East remind us of the even greater likelihood of conventional warfare on a cataclysmic scale in the region.

Now that its heavyweights – Israel and Iran – have traded blows for the very first time, we ignore that threat at our peril.

After 20 Iranian rockets were fired from Syria at military positions held by the Jewish state on the Golan Heights, Israel immediately responded by launching dozens of missiles at Iranian forces in Syria.

They hit a radar station, air defences and an ammunition dump – killing at least 23 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which is based in the UK.

Iran’s rockets – fired by the Quds Force, a wing of the Revolutionary Guards – either fell short of their targets or were knocked out by Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ defence system. Whilst not all out war, these events certainly take us to the brink.

In the Middle East, two major conflicts have been simmering side by side for years – the Arabs versus the Israelis, and the Shi’ite Muslims against the Sunni Muslims.

Last week’s events seem about to drag them into convergence and into a gigantic and highly unstable flash point.

Iran, which is not an Arab nation, is the chief Shi’ite power. Since the revolution of 1979 which overthrew the pro-Western, modernising Shah and imposed the harsh religious rule of the Ayatollahs, it has been spreading radicalism. The regime detests the West, with America its biggest adversary followed by Britain.

Iraq is dominated by Shi’ites, as indeed is Lebanon after Hezbollah, the paramilitary party aligned to Iran and which loathes Israel, won this month’s general election.

The Ayatollahs in Iran back the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Surrounded by hostile pro-Western nations, Iran needs all the allies it can find to help protect its regional interests. Support for Syria also allows it to station forces far to the West of its own borders – closer to the Mediterranean, in fact, than it has been since the days of the Persian empire 1,400 years ago.

Those forces, as we are now seeing, are within an easy striking distance of Israel. But that’s only half the story. Tensions are also at breaking point between Shi’ite Iran and Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni country. The two nations have been fighting a proxy war in Yemen, with the Iranian-backed forces enjoying most of the success.

However, it is Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states which control a majority of the region’s colossal oil resources. Now, many hardliners in Tehran are saying that, with Iran’s superior military power, it could seize those oilfields if they wanted.

And the ultra-hardliners in Tehran, who are even more numerous, welcome that plan because it would inevitably bring America and its allies (including Britain) into a war they know we wouldn’t have the stomach to fight. With such immense conventional forces arrayed on both sides, Iranian military planners believe the result would, in all probability, be a stalemate. While Iran would be prepared to take hundreds of thousands of casualties, they are betting that the Western allies would not.

That, bizarrely, would be seen in the Middle East as a win for Iran. If America cannot overcome its enemy, its enemy is victorious. No matter how much Europe would want to stay out of another Gulf war, it’s naïve to imagine for one moment that it could do so. For one thing, the Americans would expect the support of Britain and NATO. For another, we are heavily dependent on the Middle East’s oil.

And Britain is already deeply involved, for economic reasons as far as Saudi is concerned, and for moral reasons when it comes to its long-term ally, Israel.

Small wonder, then, that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson argued so vehemently against President Donald Trump’s decision last week to tear up the 2015 agreement which reduced economic sanctions on Iran in return for a freeze on nuclear development.

The idea of provoking more conflict and giving Tehran an excuse to restart its experiments with enriched uranium, seems wilfully reckless.

 

TRUMP, though, has a rationale for his action. He argues that his aggressive tactics over North Korea has forced dictator Kim Jong-un to the negotiating table, and kickstarted a process which might even bring about the reunification of the two Koreas.

Absurd as it may seem, suggestions that he is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize should not be dismissed lightly.

When President Obama began talks with Iran to persuade them to abandon their nuclear programme, much was made of an ‘Axis of Evil’ – a loose alliance of Iran, North Korea and other rogue states, intent on global mayhem.

But what Trump has proved in his face-off with ‘Little Rocket Man’ Kim is that Obama’s evil axis is an illusion. North Korea isn’t interested in Iran. Dictators don’t do solidarity.

Trump hopes that by reimposing sanctions, he will force the Ayatollahs back to the table – and this time they will agree not only to cancel their nuclear weapons programme but also to cut back their conventional military forces and to withdraw from Syria.

That’s the goal, but the difficulties with the plan are twofold. Firstly, with America ending the trade deal, in economic terms Iran has nothing left to lose.

In theory, it can still deal with Europe (which continues to support the 2015 deal): In practice, it can’t buy any items that rely on US digital technology, such as the Airbus plane it dearly desires, and it can’t borrow from international banks that have dealings with America (which means all international banks).

Secondly, Iran is not a one-man dictatorship. Power is shared between religious, political and military leaders, all of whom are competing to prove they are more hardline than the next, all of them convinced America isn’t prepared for a ground war fought to the last man.

It’s true that the US does not want to commit ground troops. Israel, too, is anxious to avoid fighting with tanks and assault rifles against an enemy with long experience of guerrilla warfare.

That’s why the Israeli response to Iran’s failed missile attack was so swift and emphatic. ‘If it rains on us, it will storm on them,’ warned Israel’s defence minister Avigdor Lieberman. Iran is promising to respond, though this does not necessarily mean an all-out missile attack. Reprisals could take the form of terrorist attacks, whether in the Middle East or further afield.

Whatever happens, we are closer to open war between Iran and Israel, with the Saudis and US potentially being drawn in from the start, than we have ever been.

Is there are chink of hope? Curiously, there is, and it comes from an improbable source. Russia, which has been so belligerent over Ukraine and Syria, does not want to see Iran dominate the Middle East where it now has significant interests.

So, President Vladimir Putin may hold the balance of power here. It’s worth remembering that the monstrous Russian dictator Josef Stalin was the West’s vital ally in World War II. Significantly, the Israeli PM was in Moscow to mark the Russian victory over the Nazis last Wednesday.

Strange as it may seem, because he can talk to all sides, Putin could be the leader who can avert a Third World War.

Overview of events: how Iran and Israel traded blows for the first time

1.      20 rockets were fired from Syria at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights on May 10, 2018.

. Four rockets were intercepted by the Israeli Iron Dome aerial defence system, while 16 others fell short of their targets;

. No injuries or damage have been reported.

2.      Israeli fighter jets responded by striking 70 military targets belonging to Iran inside Syria, including:

. A logistics HQ belonging to the Quds (insignia right), the Iranian special forces; 

. A military compound in Kiswah, south of Damascus;

. A military compound north of Damascus; 

. Quds Force munition storage warehouses at Damascus International airport; 

. Intelligence systems and posts associated with the Quds Force;

. Observation and military posts and munitions in the Golan demilitarised zone;

. Syrian military air defence systems;

. 23 people were killed in the strikes, including five Syrian soldiers and 19 other allied fighters.

Appendage: 

Iran's presence in Syria

Mapping of Iran’s presence in Syria.

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