No, not an "accurate depiction of reality" Che, but just like Pravda, TASS, Granma and PRN a combination of the truth, what the people that pay their salaries want to believe is the truth and what they want others to believe.
In short an effort to influence the external debate.
I don't believe that "the end of the world is nigh". The world has gone through this many times before as have we as a species. It happens with regularity.
Every now and then the pieces are rearranged.
One of our more desirable traits is to try to find ways to talk ourselves out of problems. To get people around a table and hash out those things that cause conflict. However two problems invariably arise: who gets to sit around the table and who do they represent, and the problems of reaching a decision when more than two people meet at that table.
Think Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accord and the rise of the Bloc and the Reform parties, not to mention Native activism. Think of the loss of Polish sovereignty because their parliament couldn't reach a decision because every landowner in the parliament demanded a veto. Think of any planning meeting you have ever attended where the department was invited to sit around the table and decide what the programme for the next year was going to be. I have attended a number where we spent half the day just trying to define a "vision".
The instincts to avoid physical conflict are not new to this generation. They are well entrenched and have much precedence. Unfortunately despite those instincts conflict often progresses from the verbal to the physical.
While I don't foresee a general conflagration, and I hope I am right, I do see a world in which a number of players have divergent interests and common interests. And some of those players' interests have more in common with each other than they have with us. And that is concerning.
I do think that we can be in for a very long period of instability, much like the Cold War or the Hundred Years War or the 30 Years War or the Era of the Warring States in China or... I could give a depressingly long list, including the 200 year Franco-English struggle for empire. These struggles were characterised by long periods of quiet, either with or without truces, interspersed with occasional violent outbursts. And as much as conspiracy theories are derided there was central planning involved in all of these conflicts. Alliances may have been formed and reformed but each participant in the conflict had a longterm goal.
The Cold War is often described as the war won without a shot being fired. Tell that to the millions, tens of millions that died between 1945 and 1990. Find a period when somebody that self-identified with one side or the other wasn't killing somebody else. Famously, during this period of "peace and stability", and perhaps apocryphally, there was only one day when the British Army did not hear a shot fired in anger. And many other armies were in the same boat.
As I said earlier, I don't expect the end of the world, but this is a time when the pieces are realigning and governments that we used to be able to rely on because we had some common interests are finding that their interests are now elsewhere. And in common with people that used to be threats.
Also in some instances it is not so much that the threat has gone, it is that the threat has morphed. Russia is a case in point.
Russia used a multi-prong approach to try and destabilize and bring down the "West", America in particular. Tie up resources through fomenting "proxy" wars, remove national support through propaganda and covert direct action and Tanks, Tanks, Tanks, in the immortal words of Slim.
The military command in Russia saw the first two exercises as setting the ground for the main event which was the required, desireable and inevitable conflict which would see the Tanks roll over the Inter-German Border and then "Tomorrow, the World".
I believe that a number of things have changed now that suggest that only some folks in the Pentagon, and an increasingly small number, see the future conflict in those terms.
I believe that a number of people have come to the conclusion that it is not how many battles you win that gives you victory, but how many battles you avoid. This has been a longstanding view of the Chinese military, it is the view that drove Britsh diplomacy and "The Great Game", it may be what Chirac is referring to with Sherwood's tag line of "I believe war is always represents failure" (sorry if I mangled the quote Sherwood).
It would also be in line with Vladimir Putin's training and observations. As noted by many Putin was trained in disinformation and propaganda and saw first hand the value of friendship societies and the influence they could exert. He had a ringside seat to the Greenham Common Cruise Missile and Pershing Missile deployment demonstrations. Anybody remember the Cruise Missile test demonstrations here?
I believe it is a safe bet that Putin believed that the Tanks and Afghanistan were a waste of resources. That the small scale, under the radar type of actions typified by the KGB were the potential War Winners. Now that they don't have the resources for either Tanks or foreign adventures, those KGB tactics are the only ones available to him. Thus he has the opportunity to resort to tactics he is likely to believe in and little opposition from the traditionalists because they can't afford to do it their way. And he has an entrenched base of supporters and "fellow-travellers" who see the world in the same terms as they did when they were demonstrating against those missiles.
Admittedly this all presupposes that Vladimir isn't a nice guy who really has the best interests of the West at heart rather than those of Mother Russia.
And it could be that Bin Laden, and China and Britain and France and Holland don't have vested interests whose corner they are fighting.
I am prepared to be accused of being a conspiracy theorist. But the way I see it, the world is a very unstable place right now, predicting the future is a mug's game. The world may turn out to be on the cusp of the second coming. But I don't think we should be counting on it.
Do you know why revolutions occur? Because everybody agrees the people in charge are screwing up.
Do you know why revolutions fail? Because nobody can agree what to do next.
