-
- Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs Gen. Henry Shelton will
be the next U.S. official to seek to
reason with an increasingly unreasonable
- or simply more contemptuous
- Russian regime when he visits Moscow next
week.
-
- If, as expected, Shelton raises
the issue of Russian
breaches of a secret 1995 protocol between Vice
President Al Gore and Prime
Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, in accordance
with which Moscow was supposed
to end all conventional arms sales to
Iran by Dec. 31, 1999, the JCS chairman
will likely get the same
back-of-the-hand treatment the Kremlin has lately
been dishing out to
other representatives of the Clinton-Gore administration.
-
- Among the recent
examples of such ominous behavior:
-
- * Aggressive Russian
overflights of the USS Kitty Hawk
(insult was subsequently added to
injury when photographs were e-mailed
to the ship showing its
unprepared crew scrambling to respond to that unfriendly
act).
-
- * The forward
deployment of long-range nuclear-capable
bombers to the Russian Far
East, within striking distance of Alaska.
-
- * The conviction and
sentencing to 20 years in prison
of American businessman Edmond Pope on
trumped-up charges of spying, after
a classic Soviet-style "show
trial" and the inhumane denial of
Western medical care to a man
believed to have recontracted a potentially
fatal cancer.
-
- With these and other
actions, the Kremlin is clearly
putting the United States and the world
on notice that Russia is once again
reverting to form - a certain rival
for influence and resources around
the world and a potentially serious
threat to American citizens and interests.
- _____
-
- Clinton
Administration To Sneak In
Back-Door Deal With
Russia?
-
- This week, NATO foreign ministers and their Russian
counterpart
will meet in Brussels for the North Atlantic Council
meeting. All other
things being equal, this occasion seems likely to be
the last one available
to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and
Russia's foreign minister
to sign a particularly ill-advised bilateral
agreement ñ one that
would obligate the parties to provide
advance notice of all ballistic missiles
and virtually all space-launch
vehicles.
-
- This agreement would be a disaster to the ability of
the United
States to "maintain ... U.S. leadership in space,"
as
Clinton's national security strategy for the U.S. ostensibly requires.
This accord - called the "Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on
Missile
Launch Notification" - would effectively pre-empt
decisions and perhaps
even preclude recommendations now being readied
about U.S. space policy
by a second congressionally chartered
commission led by former Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
-
- Specifically,
Rumsfeld's commission seems likely to call
for far more ready and
reliable and far less costly access to space if
America is to project
and exercise space power.
-
- The Clinton-Gore team should respond honorably, by
deferring
the signature of this so-called "Pre- and Post-Launch
Notification
System" (PLNS) accord - and the new limits it will
impose upon America's
access to space and, therefore, the impediments
it will create to U.S.
control of the increasingly indispensable
theater of commercial and military
operations known as outer
space.
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