chuck wrote:
So while she has none of the big guns any more, she can still be a descent bet for not shooting her in the foot in the near future with the little BB guns she still has, So she still has a little credibility.
While I doubt that any Russian politician would agree on being on descent in any way, I'm also highly sceptical on whether they really have as much political acumen as you want them to have.
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In many quarters, Russia's minute credibility is a lot greater than ours.
And where exactly might that be? Sure, continental Europe is partly dependent on Russian gas. And we just love to think of us being the smart guys playing the Russian card against them evil and dumb Americans. But mind you, this has little to do with Russian "credibility".
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We had the capability to rip Saddam's army off. But we did not have the capability to weather the consequences. Furthermore we elected people into position of dominating influences who were as utterly oblivious to that fact as a neaderthal might have been to calculus.
Hey! That's outright discrimination! Where's the board police?!!!

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So no one trust us to not do them. This is why we have no credibility now. Only those who believe they can exploit our basist instincts, interpreted in the most crude and simple minded fashion, still believe we can be relied upon.
Your view of the world is about as simplistic as that of someone you probably don't want to be compared with, you know...
Fact is, there is still a lot of credibility for the US out there. Granted, it's not born out of love, rather out of desperation. But nevertheless it's there.
Jorit