President Vladimir Putin complains that the West is reigniting the Cold War. He said in a speech to the State Council, a top level group of officials and military officers, that because of NATO's failure so far to accommodate Russia's security concerns, " We are forced to retaliate, to take corresponding decisions. Russia has, and always will have, responses to these new challenges." Russian officials are especially upset with the United State's decision to install an anti-ballistic missile system in the Czech Republic and Poland. In response Russia, after a lengthy hiatus, recently re-instituted strategic bomber patrols over Europe and Scandinavia. In the words of the assertive Russian president, "a new phase of the arms race is unfolding...and it's not our fault because we did not start it." Mr. Putin appears to have a point.
It would not be the first time conservative elements in the US government distorted security threats to achieve desired levels of funding for the military-industrial complex. In 1976 George H.W. Bush was the director of central intelligence. He allowed a team of neoconservative ideologues to rewrite the CIA's estimates of Soviet military power. His decision was a blatant politicizing of a process that was supposed to be rigorously objective. Among the group of "howling right wingers" was Paul Wolfowitz, later to become a deputy secretary of defense under Shrub, and who endlessly lobbied for war on Iraq after the homeland attack. "Team B", as it was called, portrayed a decaying and economically moribund Soviet Union as a resurgent world threat undergoing a tremendous military buildup. In fact it was cutting military spending. They dramatically overestimated the accuracy of Soviet missiles, the number of 'Backfire' bombers, the danger of technologies never created, and worst of all, a supposed secret strategy to fight and win a nuclear war with the US. Team B selectively leaked their alarmist and inaccurate findings to sympathetic journalists. The uproar created lasted into the next decade and contributed to the election of Ronald 'Raygun' and his tremendously expensive expansion of the US military. His defense spending deficits were not erased until Bill Clinton's administration. When the Cold War was supposedly over, the CIA went back and examined the findings. None of Team B's conclusions were correct, but they did have the desired effect: increases in military spending for more than a decade.
It seems Paul Wolfowitz had WMD on the brain early in his career as a professional Casandra. But Bush senior was not the first to corrupt the supposedly objective analysis of data gathered by the American intelligence community. Richard Nixon did it in 1969 when he insisted the CIA revise it's analysis of the Soviet Union's first strike capability. The corruption reached a new level of extreme in Shrub's regime when his director of central intelligence, George Tenant, delivered a "slam dunk" case of WMDs to justify the Iraq invasion. But even the willing cooperation of the director was not enough for the neocons at the Defense Department. They circumvented the CIA by making use of their neofascist connections in Italy, paid collaborators like Ahmed Chalabi, and opportunistic disinformers like "Curveball" to produce unvetted intelligence data that was fed directly to the hungry true believers in Vice Darth's office for use in selling the war on Iraq to America.