Russia's Double Game

Think Progess has tied a number of threads together to give a rather bleak forcast for the Middle East in coming years:

Russia announced this week that it would proceed with a plan to sell 29 sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, spurning a call by the Bush administration to not “continue with the arms sale.”

Rosa Brooks writes today in the Los Angeles Times that the Russian-Iranian deal is cause for alarm because it could precipitate the next war, a war between Iran and Israel. Brooks writes that Russia is playing a deceptive “double game” that could initiate such a war in the near future:

[...]

Brooks writes a regional war would draw the U.S. into the conflict, causing the entire Middle East to “implode,” terrorist attacks worldwide to increase further, and the U.S.’s global influence to wane. Andrei Piontkovsky, a Russian political analyst, believes Russia’s oil and gas oligarchs won’t shed any tears over a war in the Middle East, especially if it keeps oil prices high.

One wonders whether 50 years in the future, if the idea that the 'Cold War' ended when Russia abandoned communism will be a laughable one.