Those pesky, pot-stirring Russians

These recent developments should be of particular interest to circumspect reader, military man, and emissary-of-goodwill to a former Soviet bloc country, David...

Norwegian and British fighter jets were scrambled to intercept Russian bombers over the north Atlantic, the latest in a series of such incidents, Norway's military command said Friday.
Two Russian Tupolev-160 bombers or "Blackjacks" were detected by the NATO allies flying along the Norwegian coast before passing by northern Scotland, a military spokesman told AFP.

"We dispatched two F-16s from Bodoe airbase (in the north of Norway) to identify them," Lieutenant-Colonel Jon Inge Oegland said, adding that Britain had also sent aircraft.

"It conforms with the declarations of (Russian) president (Vladmir) Putin and we are expecting more such flights in the future."

While I'm not opposed to another Cold War(A cold war every now and then keeps our military/industrial complex sharp), we really should ask the Russians to wait until we're finished in Iraq before they start flying around provoking sovereign nations and generally scaring the crap out of everybody. And frankly, we can't afford a massive military build up right now. They should give us like two years to extricate ourselves from Iraq and then assuming we're not kicking the crap out of Iran too by then, we'll be glad to mix it up again with our old foes the Ruskies.