Poland’s prime minister shortly after inking a missile agreement with the US earlier this month:

• Speaking in an interview televised on news channel TVN24, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the United States had agreed to help augment Poland’s defenses with Patriot missiles in exchange for placing 10 missile defense interceptors in the eastern European country.
  ”We have crossed the Rubicon,” he said, referring to U.S. consent to meet Poland’s demands.

And today, the domino effect plattering the Caucasus tensed up a notch.
The Russian edition of Decider George, Dimitri Medvedev, talked the big, hot-air talk.

• President Medvedev set tensions soaring when he recognised the independence of two breakaway republics inside Georgia.
  “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” he said.
  Hours earlier he had ordered his Foreign Ministry to start establishing diplomatic ties with the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
  The move brought instant condemnation from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other Western countries.
  President Bush appealed to the Kremlin to “reconsider this irresponsible decision.
  David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that it was “unjustifiable and unacceptable.”

Of course, Medvedev‘s Dick Cheney is Vladimir Putin, Russia’s primer minister.
Look here for an interesting discussion of Putin’s fingers playing the Georgia episode.

Dick Cheney, of course, is one Dufus Dick, a frightened-by-his-own-shadow warmonger.
And Decider George is the perfect companion.
Neither one served in the military — We won’t count Decider George’s Texas National Guard/partying in Montgomery time because we really couldn’t consider that shit ‘military’ service when US boys and girls were dying in Vietnam — yet both have started two badly-run wars and have a shitload of blood on their draft-dodging asses.

Vladimir and Dimitri playing hardball with Dufus Dick and Decider George — a horror/disaster movie in the making.

Just as it goes, it was reported today in the LA Times, Joseph R. Wood, Dufus Dick’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, was in Georgia just days before the ensuing conflict started, and most likely met with Western-lust-after-dumb-ass, Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president.
Despite doing the warfare math:

• It had nothing to do, the vice president’s office said, with a military operation that some have said suggests a renewal of the Cold War.

Yeah, right.
One person of all those on the earth not to be trusted: Dufus Dick Cheney.
One cold-ass sonofabitch.
In a speech at a journalism conference in early July, noted investigative journalist Seymour Hersh told of a meeting of White House officials, including Dufus Dick, to discuss how to get the US into a war with Iran.
From Think Progress:

• During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred.
  Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them.
  This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected.

And this from the Times in the UK on an opinion from Sergei Markov, Putin’s senior political scientist:

• “George Bush’s Administration is promoting interests of candidate John McCain,” said Dr Markov.
  “Defeated by Barak Obama on all fronts, McCain has one last card to play yet – the creation of a virtual Cold War with Russia . . . Bush himself did not want a war in South Ossetia but his Republican Party did not leave him any choice.”
  The Americans were now engineering an armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Dr Markov added.

Further down in the same Times piece is a mirror on how the outlook on world affairs has changed the past few years:

• “In the old days under Soviet rule we didn’t believe a word of our own propaganda but we thought that information was free in the West and we longed for it,” said Katya, a middle-aged Muscovite.
  “But we have learnt since that the West has its own propaganda and in some ways it is more powerful because people believe it.”

Yes, and about that so-called missile deal with the Poles?
According to globalsecurity.org, the US will place up to 10 interceptor missiles in Poland by 2013, part of a broader missile shield that includes a radar facility in the Czech Republic, alongside facilities in place in the US, Greenland and Britain.
And what’s really, really bad: It’s all for nothing, other than to piss off the Russkies.
Phil Coyle, former top weapons tester at the Pentagon, told the most-excellent Danger Room blog the missile system is right now fairly worthless:

• “The system proposed for Poland and the Czech Republic doesn’t exist, has never been tested, and has no demonstrated effectiveness to defend Europe or the U.S. under realistic operational conditions.”
  He says that even our existing missile defenses, installed in Alaska, couldn’t stop more than one or two rudimentary missiles from, say, Iran.
  “For these reasons the U.S. BMD system proposed for Europe is causing strife with Russia for nothing.”

Nothing means a lot to warmonger Dufus Dick.