Russia "Balances" Against Bush: Gives Iran High-Speed Torpedo...Good-Bye US Naval Superiority

Add to the list of George Bush's foreign policy blunders which put us in greater danger: sparking an underwater arms race which undercuts what was previously a clear US naval superiority. Foreign Policy 101 says that when your actions make other nations feel threatened, they form alliances to "balance" against you. The Freeper Neanderthals among us may have a hard time with all these multi-syllabic words, (They hate us for our freedom, man, that's it, now SHUT UP!) but the people responsible for US foreign policy throughout most of our history understood the concept quite well.

"Bandwagoning," the flip side of the balancing vs. bandwagoning theory, happens when countries decide that your interests are their interests. When you get too strong, or your motives become questionable, however, weaker countries peel off and start balancing against you.

Russia apparently decided that the US attacking and building permanent bases in Iraq, and now openly threatening Iran, is maybe a bit too much. Sharing its high-speed "Shkval" torpedo technology with Iran in one stroke negates the clear naval superiority we have spent 50 years building. Traveling at 230 mph underwater, using "supercavitation" technology, no ship or aircraft carrier can get out of the way of these things fast enough. It's one of the few areas of weapons research in which Russia may have an edge, and we'll have to spend another $100 billion that we don't have to develop countermeasures, if there are any. Even the sight of one American aircraft carrier in smoke and flames delivers an enormous blow to American prestige.

Just one more reason why now and then it might be better to try talking to a country instead of bullying it around, which is all Bush knows how to do. Iran was never our enemy until the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 and installed that son-of-a-bitch the Shah of Iran. Saddam Hussein had nothing on our boy the Shah when it came to torture methods.

Hey, I WANT to have an empire. I WANT to be a citizen of the strongest country on Earth. And George Bush, through his inability to comprehend anything but force, is f-ing it up for me. Even those sly Roman emperors had to decide whom to attack and whom they couldn't afford to piss-off, for the moment. Bush has decided he can just afford to piss-off everyone, all the time, and that's that. I wonder how long he would have lasted as a Roman emperor.