Oppps, forgot to include this one in my last post. This is the second article in The Nation that questions Obama's pending choice for secretary of state--there is talk he may pick Robert Gates, who worked in Carters adminstration and has some history provoking Russia:

Improved relations with Russia are critical to the change toward a more peaceful world that Obama has promised, but it is disquieting in the extreme that some of his closest advisers are inveterate hawks with a history of needlessly provoking tension with the Russians during the cold war days. Key among them is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, engineered the US involvement on the side of Islamic fanatics in Afghanistan.

It was decades later that the truth came out that the Soviets invaded only after being deliberately provoked by US hawks. One of them was Robert Gates, who worked for Brzezinski in the Carter administration and who is currently the secretary of defense; President-elect Obama is now reported to be considering retaining Gates in that position. A 1996 press release promoting Gates's memoir promised the revelation of "Carter's never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen--six months before the Soviets invaded."