I’m having difficulty working it out.  Is it because:

• …we get absolutely nothing out of this?
• …it brazenly goes against previous national security agreements made between the United States and what were, prior to this morning, staunch regional allies?
• …it came out of nowhere, to the point where the ranking Republican Senator on Armed Services is asking why this suddenly appeared?
• …it is fairly clearly a desperate domestic-policy bone thrown to a liberal base currently coming to a boil over the Democrats’ slow-motion collapse on health care?
• …or is it because they announced it on THE SEVENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOVIET INVASION OF POLAND, YOU DAFT, HISTORICALLY ILLITERATE, IDIOTS?!?

…or should I just embrace the healing power of ‘and?’

Moe Lane

No commentary necessary:

Former Polish President and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Lech Walesa, has spoken out about media reports that the US has scrapped plans to install a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“Americans have always cared only about their interests, and all other [countries] have been used for their purposes. This is another example,” Mr Walesa told TVN24. “[Poles] need to review our view of America, we must first of all take care of our business,” he added.

“I could tell from what I saw, what kind of policies President Obama cultivates,” the former president added. “I simply don’t like this policy, not because this shield was required [in Poland], but [because of] the way we were treated,” he concluded.

Why can’t Lech Walesa get a little perspective? After all, Poland isn’t the first US ally to go under the Obamabus. As one friend of mine said:

Honduras, Colombia, Poland, Czech Republic - If you’re a small country menaced by a big tyrant, we’ll kick you right in the teeth.

I suspect Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel are taking note.

Today is an anniversary that is being marked rather somberly in places like the Baltic countries.

Seventy years ago today, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany - Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop - stunned the world by announcing a non-aggression pact between their two (totalitarian) countries.

While there had been a great deal of vituperate invective between the two great socialist powers, the underlying reality was that they had long been de facto allies. During the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Soviet Union provided training facilities for German pilots as Germany tried to secretly rebuild its air force - something that was forbidden to Germany under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In the meantime, the Soviet Union continued to be a very large supplier of raw materials to Germany’s rebuilding industries. And during the 1930s, Nazi Germany’s nascent “security services” learned a great deal from the Soviet Union’s “security agency”….

So on the surface, the agreement of a simple “non-aggression pact” seemed rather anodyne.

But it was the secret protocols that were the real “content” of the agreement.

We’ll look at those details - and why they are suddenly important again - below the fold.

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