The map above shows SCO's current geographic reach in dark green and states with observer status in the organization in light green.  Anyone noticing an eerie resemblance to the mapboard in RISK is not being paranoid - this may well be a campaign map for World War III.  We'd be fools to ignore the possibility.

Those of us old enough remember that the old Warsaw Pact was a 'mutual security organization,' too.  THAT 'mutual security organization' invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, murdered thousands of people for not being sufficiently Communist, held regular rehearsals to invade Western Europe, aimed thousands of nuclear missiles at the US, UK, Canada and Europe, and posed a threat to European and American security which has not abated yet - as recent events in Georgia show. 

The Stalinist mentality which caused the Russians to mass hundreds of thousands of troops on the West German-East German border for thirty years despite any remote possibility that outnumbered NATO forces posed any threat to their Warsaw Pact alliance at all is alive and well.

The new Stalin, Vladimir Putin, has lost no time reviving Russia's old xenophobic distrust of the same West that spent freely to help Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Putin says that democracy and the West are responsible for the chaos following the dissolution of European Communism.  That's one way of looking at it, I guess. 

Another way would be to rid ourselves of the illusions so many of us, including me, harbored that there was any dealing with the nomenklatura, the "fortunate sons" of the Russian Empire. Communism wasn't the problem - Russia can't abide a world it doesn't run.  That's the problem, and apparently it always WAS the problem.  They are the Free World's malignant, manipulative mother-in-law.  And as long as the financial security of the handful of men who wield true power in Russia is imperiled by the possibility that the seed of democracy will spread from the West to their own country and send them to jail, or simply packing from their plush lives, they will continue to stir up trouble and kill as many people as they think they have to.

There is no co-existing with them.  Much of the money we paid them through the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program supposedly to reduce their stocks of weapons of mass destruction have actually gone to rebuild the Russian nuclear arsenal so that we cannot target it nearly as effectively as we were able to before it was largely moved to "Topaz" mobile missile launchers, and to make new varieties of nerve gas which our current antidotes won't be effective against. 

Not to mention the Russians' ongoing work with diseases such as monkeypox and recombinant versions of Legionella designed to cause incurable, severe sclerosing damage to the human nervous system - research specifically prohibited by the Biological Weapons Convention.  Oops, I mentioned it, which may make me one of the few journalists to do so recently. 

(I was one of the first bloggers to mention the scarcity of typewriters which could type superscripts in 1972-73 when a Democratic Party operative gave forged Texas Air National Guard memos to CBS and Dan Rather uttered them as factual in an attempt to smear the President's name during the 2004 election, so I don't think that I should be too modest with that description.) 

We shouldn't fool ourselves about the good intentions of the people running this alliance, and we should be strongly aware that the concentration of political power in those countries means that the good intentions of most of their citizens means absolutely nothing.  Most of their citizens cannot order invasions of other countries or call them back - their leaders have that power and guard it jealously.  It's as though the members of the US Senate and House of Representatives were appointed by the President and none of them had to stand for re-election by the people.

World War III has never been closer. 

Only a fool wouldn't prepare for it.