The war on terror has been thoroughly debunked (see this and this).

So the military-industrial complex is trying to find another enemy sufficiently scary to justify trillions of dollars in defense spending and the continuation of the perpetual state of war.

Our former enemy - the Soviet Union - has now broken up. Russia's economy pales in comparison to that of the former USSR. Russia is run more by billionaires and the Russian Mob than by the Communists. And Russia harbors very few imperial ambitions.

But that isn't stopping people like Dick Cheney from trying to raise the "Red menace" from the dustbin of history.

Remember - in the 70's - Cheney was instrumental in generating fake intelligence exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to undermine coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which conveniently justified huge amounts of cold war spending. See also this article.

Indeed, Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were probably more responsible than anyone else for the original Red scare and Cold War.

With the air quickly escaping from the whole "War on Terror" fiasco, Cheney and the boys are trying a re-run of their tried-and-true fear tactics regarding the Ruskies, even though the "Soviet menace" is dead and buried.

Remember that, according to former British Defense Secretary, Cheney called the shots in the Iraq war. And a top official at the State Department stated there was a secret "cabal" involving Cheney, and that Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the country's foreign policy.