Was Bush Right After All ??? (To Go to the Middle East and Kick Butt ! )

[krsna]

k

 

Imagine all the coumties(Muslim) in the Middle East becoming democratic and devotees going in there like they did when the Soviet Union imploded. The Second Coming.(or third)/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Guest guest]

you mean get his butt kicked.

the amurrikans are far from having kicked anyone's butt over there. it is just another vietnam, you watch it. 1500, or was it 15000, killed on the amurrikan side, sice the stopping of hostilities. all those countries have a right to have the government they want - that is democratic. enforced democracy is not democracy, so even if the entire middle east became democratic, they would still stone you to death if you went preaching there and was found out.

I am appalled at the arrogance of us westerners, with which we think we can enforce our lack of civilisation on others. Bush attacking Iraq is exactly such a manifestation of being devoid of civilisation.

western civilisation sounds like a good idea though. When are we going to start???

[krsna]

Was Bush right after all?

As Syria pulls out of Lebanon, and the winds of change blow through the Middle East, this is the difficult question that opponents of the Iraq war are having to face

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

08 March 2005

 

 

Trucks carrying Syrian soldiers began to file out of Beirut yesterday. As they departed, Syria's President, Bashar Assad, under intense pressure from the US, promised to withdraw all 14,000 troops to eastern areas of Lebanon by the end of this month. The White House almost immediately dismissed the plan as failing to set a deadline for total withdrawal from the country.

 

So this was too little, too slow for Washington. But however circumscribed, the first phase of Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon is another sign of change across the Middle East. The precise extent and implications of the pull-out (or to be more accurate pull-back) are still unclear, and the same goes for the host of other developments, from Palestine to Iraq, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. Some may be sincere and lasting, others contrived and short-lived, but all suggest the political straitjacket that has long imprisoned the Arab world is loosening, if not yet coming apart at the seams.

 

It is barely six weeks since the US President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of "ending tyranny in our world". Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of "regime changes" imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President's opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right.

 

That debate is now happening, in America and beyond, as the first waves of reform lap at the Arab world. Post-Saddam Iraq has held its first proper election. In their own elections, Palestinians have overwhelmingly chosen a moderate leader. Hosni Mubarak, who for 24 years has permitted no challenge to his rule in Egypt, has announced a multi-candidate presidential election this year. Even Saudi Arabia is not immune, having just held its first municipal elections. Next time around, Saudi spokesmen promise, women too will be permitted to vote.

 

Most remarkably of all, perhaps, popular demonstrations in Beirut last week brought the downfall of one pro-Syrian government and - with the help of fierce pressure from Washington and the EU - the agreement by Syria to start withdrawing its troops in Lebanon.

 

How much Mr Bush is responsible for these development is debatable. The peaceful uprising in Lebanon was provoked by outrage at the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, in which a Syrian hand is suspected, although not proven. Then the man who insisted on elections in Iraq when the US wanted to postpone or dilute them was Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, leader of Iraq's majority Shia community. And the death from old age of Yasser Arafat, not machinations in Washington, led to the election that might break the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock.

 

Indubitably, however, even his most grudging domestic opponents and his harshest critics in the region admit that Mr Bush is also in part responsible. The 2003 invasion of Iraq may have been justified by a giant fraud, but that, and above all the January election to which it led, transfixing the Arab world, has proved a catalyst.

 

The mood at the White House, on Capitol Hill and in the punditocracy has been transformed. The weapons of mass destruction fiasco is forgotten, the deaths of US troops have slipped from the front pages. Even Senator Edward Kennedy, bitter Democratic critic of the invasion, admits that Mr Bush deserves credit "for what seemed to be a tentative awakening of democracy in the region".

 

The neoconservatives are predictably triumphalist. "What changed the climate in the Middle East was not just the US invasion and show of arms," exults the commentator Charles Krauthammer in Time magazine. "It was US determination and staying power, and the refusal of its people last November to turn out a president who rejected an 'exit strategy'."

 

Beyond argument, old certainties in the region are less certain; old equations of power are having to be recalculated. It is, of course, only a start, and things could go dreadfully wrong. Today the pro-Syrian Hizbollah party, regarded as a terrorist group, by Washington, holds a massive demonstration. Some see the spectre of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war and this time, they predict Syria could be thrown into bloody chaos.

 

Success in Iraq, too, is anything but assured and there is the wild card of Iran, locked in dispute with the European Union and the United States over its suspected nuclear ambitions, and with huge mischief-making potential in both Iraq and Lebanon.

 

The moves by Saudi Arabia and Egypt may yet be tactical, a controlled release of steam before the lid is screwed down once more. There is no guarantee that the Islamic Brotherhood, the most powerful opposition party, will be allowed to take part in the Egyptian vote.

 

Then there is the law of unintended consequences. The maddening thing about democracy, from the viewpoints of Mr Bush and Mr Mubarak alike, is that you cannot be sure of what you will get. A Shia-dominated government will emerge in Iraq, but no one knows whether it will be secular or theocratic. What will Washington do if Islamic movements threaten repressive but reliable autocrats such as Mr Mubarak? And for all Mr Bush's argument that the survival of liberty in the US depends on liberty abroad, there is no guarantee that democracy will end terrorism.

 

Some US officials compare the situation in the Arab world with that of eastern Europe in 1989, when the people's discontent with their rulers reached boiling point, and repressive regimes simply lacked the will to repress any longer.

 

The same happened with the Soviet Union in 1991. But that year offers two other, more depressing parallels. One was the futile insurrection by Iraqi Kurds and Shias against Saddam Hussein. Then in Algeria, the US and the West sat silent as the military regime, faced with the victory of the Islamist FIS movement in elections, simply cancelled them. The result was a brutal civil war in which more than 100,000 died.

 

When push has come to shove in the Middle East before, the US has invariably sided with the devil it knows, true to the philosophy: "He may be a sonofabitch, but at least he's our sonofabitch." Will this President Bush be as good as his soaring words on that icy morning in January? Lebanon may provide the first test.

 

[Kulapavana]

Source: LewRockwell

 

Is Bush Plunging Deeper Into the Quagmire?

by Paul Craig Roberts

 

 

How much longer can American prestige survive the embarrassments inflicted by President Bush?

 

Bush’s demand that Syria immediately withdraw its troops from Lebanon is a ricochet demand. If Lebanon cannot have free elections while under foreign military occupation, how, asks the rest of the world, does Iraq have free elections when it is under US military occupation?

 

Bush’s latest guffaw-evoking bluster is the work of desperation. Every explanation and justification Bush has given for his ill-fated invasion of Iraq has proven false. There were no weapons of mass destruction. No terrorist links to Osama bin Laden. No WMD programs. The penultimate justification – to bring democracy to Iraq – fast faded when the Islamic Shi’ite winners announced that Islam would be a basis for the new Iraqi state.

 

The assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri permitted the Bush administration to shift attention from its Iraq failure to Syria’s presence in Lebanon, just as the US invasion of Iraq shifted attention from Bush’s failure to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan.

 

Bush hasn’t sufficient troops to occupy Iraq and none to spare with which to invade Syria. But the lack of means does not stop Bush from issuing ultimatums. Bush’s tough talk plays well to his supernationalist supporters at home.

 

Syria, of course, has its own reasons for getting out of Lebanon, and Syria’s withdrawal lets Bush claim that his invasion of Iraq is spreading democracy to Lebanon. Yesterday Iraq. Today Lebanon. Tomorrow the Middle East.

 

This latest justification for invading Iraq was on no one’s mind when the US invaded Iraq. It is likely to be as short lived as the other justifications. Throughout the Lebanese civil war from the mid 1970's until 1990 Lebanon was a collection of armed camps more numerous than those in Iraq today.

 

The Lebanese government invited the Syrians into Lebanon shortly after the outbreak of the civil war. Unlike the US in Iraq, the Syrians have managed to perform the role of peacekeeper in Lebanon without leveling entire cities, destroying Lebanon's infrastructure, and killing tens of thousands of civilians. (This is not to say that in 1982 the Syrian government did not brutally put down an Islamic fundamentalist uprising in the Syrian city of Hama.)

 

Syria has a secular Alawite government. Now that Shi’ites are taking over in Iraq, Shi'ites in Lebanon – and especially the Iranian sponsored and controlled Shi'ite Hizbullah movement – are likely to gain additional political traction as well. Today, we are witnessing the creation of precisely the Shi'ite geopolitical bloc – the "Shi’ite crescent from Iran to Lebanon" – of which King Abdullah of Jordan warned, without effect, a deluded President Bush.

 

Proud not to be "reality based," the Bush administration is oblivious to the situation on the ground. But reality in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia is up close and personal. The last thing wanted by the rulers of those countries, as well as the leaders of Egypt and Pakistan, is more instability that will play into the hands of such Islamist revolutionaries as Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi. But instability is rising, and the rulers of those countries now fear being swept away.

 

Syria had absolutely nothing to gain from the assassination of former Lebanese prime Minister Hariri. In fact, the assassination was a catastrophe for the Syrian government. It is Osama bin Laden’s aim, and perhaps Iran’s, to destabilize Lebanon and Syria in order to draw the US in deeper. Instability serves bin Laden’s revolutionary purposes and aids Iran by creating new problems for the US in the region.

 

Today, Syria has begun to withdraw from Lebanon not because of US and Israeli ultimatums but because of the threat of a new axis of Shi'ite power stretching from Teheran westward through southern Iraq into Lebanon, and then back into Syria itself from both Lebanon and Iraq. The secular Syrian government now sees far more danger from Iran and Islamists supported by Teheran than it does from the US. It may well be that Syria would like American protection from a rising Islamist and Iranian geostrategic revolution. The Bush administration, however, is too stupid to realize this.

 

The United States lacks the resources necessary to occupy the Middle East. Bush has failed to occupy Baghdad, much less Iraq. Indeed, US troops could not even occupy Fallujah, a small city of 300,000. Unable to take control of the city, the Americans destroyed it. The US cannot level every city in the Middle East.

 

The US invasion of Iraq has brought to power long-suppressed Shi’ite majorities and shown Islamists that secular rulers can be overthrown. Change has begun that the US cannot control, change that will exhaust American resources and will.

 

March 8, 2005

 

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

 

[Guest guest]

By Victor Davis Hanson

 

Even in the face of spreading reform in the Middle East, Americans

remain divided over the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein and then

staying on to foster democracy in Iraq. But petroleum should not be

part of that controversy. Nevertheless, the most persistent smear of

this war has been this idea of "blood for oil" — whether the so-called

Afghanistan pipeline or Halliburton "grab" for concessions and

profits.

 

True, our foreign policies, like those of all industrial powers, are

in part guided by strategic considerations. Cheap gas, however, is not

the supreme driving force behind American intervention. The lack of

oil may explain our wrong decision to ignore Rwanda, but not our right

choice to stop the dying in the Balkans, Somalia and Indonesia. In

fact, China, not America, is already the world player most guided by

Oilpolitik.

 

Whatever George Bush is, he is certainly no longer a realist oilman

content with the status quo of propping up dictatorial Middle East

regimes. Pulling troops out of Saudi Arabia and toppling Saddam —

while putting Iran on notice — sent shivers up an oilman's spine.

After the Americans invaded Baghdad, the price of petroleum

skyrocketed, enraging voters back home. America currently pours

billions into oil-rich Iraq, rather than siphoning Arab petroleum out.

That is why the same critics who once claimed that we were thieves now

deride us as dupes.

 

Invading Iraq was not to loot its oil treasure, but more likely to

cease the recycling of its petrodollars that went to terrorists and

weapons procurement. Oil revenue allowed Saddam to attack four

countries. His oil money subsidized terrorists like Abu Nidal and Abu

Abbas. He sent cash bounties to suicide murderers on the West Bank and

helped al-Qaidists in Kurdistan. Petrodollars empowered him to butcher

his own people, and thus indirectly led to endless Western patrolling

of two-thirds of his airspace.

 

In contrast, Iraqi oil revenue is now transparent and under the

control of an elected government. Reserves are no longer pledged by a

dictator to France and Russia in sweetheart deals and at extortionist

rates. Nor is petroleum diverted by greedy insiders of the U.N.

Oil-for-Food program.

 

Oil, remember, is also not just an American interest. Japan, Europe,

India and China depend on imported fossil fuels far more than does the

United States. Impoverished Third World states need moderately priced

petroleum to salvage their chronically weak economies. For all the

pampered terrorists' bluster about "stealing our resources," the real

moral onus is more often on the opulent oil producer like a Saudi

Arabia, Iran or Kuwait rather than a destitute consumer like

Bangladesh or Peru.

 

Oil is pumped out of the ground in the Middle East at costs of between

$5 and $8 a barrel. Through the power of a cartel, it is then sold to

the world for $50. The Saudis, Gulf States and Iranians - who sit atop

it but neither developed it nor can pump it without foreign expertise

- have exclusive rights of possession protected by international

protocols and ultimately the U.S. Navy.

 

As thanks, the oil producers have formed a monopoly — every bit as

ruthless as any 19th century creation of a John D. Rockefeller — in

unison to cut production and jack up the world price. This

price-fixing harms millions from rural Brazil to Albania. OPEC, not

the United States, is the real cutthroat petroleum profiteer.

 

Every gambling spree by a Saudi sheik in Monaco or outlandish $1,000 a

night hotel in the Gulf comes in part from the income of a peasant in

Bolivia or Chad. The money for mustard gas in Iraq, a nuclear reactor

in Iran and hate-filled propaganda of the Saudi madrassas all derived

from rigged oil prices and went to regimes that were neither elected

nor capable of creating real wealth through the participation of a

middle class.

 

Such an easy slur like "blood for oil" persists because the

alternative explanation is apparently unpalatable. After Sept. 11,

Bush abandoned the realist policies of his past and the Cold War

calculus of a half-century, by zeroing in on the old pathology of the

Middle East: dictators paying off theocrats and terrorists to redirect

popular anger at their failures onto the United States.

 

If Bush's democratic gambit succeeds, the world will be a far better

place. But until then as we work on reform in Iraq, let us also

conserve, develop new sources and wean ourselves from foreign oil.

Promoting democracy also means keeping astronomical profits out of the

hands of both failed autocrats and killers. By reducing world demand

to weaken the cartel, we will both help poorer nations and restore the

financial integrity of the United States.

 

Those who scream "no blood for oil" would do better to chant "no oil

money for bloody terrorists and dictators."

 

[krsna]

http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-03-08-voa44.cfm

[Kulapavana]

"Bush tells Syria to Scram from Lebanon"

 

he he... that is why they had Hariri killed. To undercut Hammas and Syria. But Syrians are not quite gone yet, and besides, who is going to replace them? US Marines? study history.

 

BIG ASURAS PLAYING DIRTY FOR BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF OUR MONEY - that is all they are.

 

Officially, over 1500 US Soldiers dead, over 20,000 incapacitated and permanently removed from sevice. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. No end in sight. Still feeling pretty good about Dubya's dirty war?

[krsna]

All I really know that there are many Krsna temples in America and devotees can go on Harinam procession in New York, Washington, etc...

 

But try going to Cairo, Riyadh or Damascus with your mrdrunga and cartels!:

 

*****************************************

 

Julian Borger in Washington

Wednesday March 9, 2005

The Guardian

 

President George Bush yesterday portrayed the anti-Syrian protests in Beirut as a decisive moment for the spread of freedom across the Middle East, and one in which the international community had high stakes.

He rejected Syria's troop redeployment in Lebanon as "delaying tactics and half measures" and repeated his demand for a total withdrawal before Lebanese elections in May. Without such a move, Syria would become even more isolated, he said.

 

Mr Bush told an audience of military scholars at the National Defence University in Washington: "Today I have a message for the people of Lebanon: All the world is witnessing your great movement of conscience. Lebanon's future belongs in your hands.

 

"The American people are on your side. Millions across the Earth are on your side. The momentum of freedom is on your side. And freedom will prevail in Lebanon."

 

In his speech, which dwelt exclusively on events in the Middle East, the president did not refer directly to yesterday's pro-Syrian, anti-American demonstrations in Beirut, other than to declare that in a "generational commitment" to democratic reform in that region there would be times "when the headlines aren't so good".

 

White House officials have told journalists that the president sees some "validation" for the Iraq invasion in the current democratic trend in such countries as Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian territories.

 

He did not make that connection explicitly in yesterday's speech, but hinted strongly at a link, when he declared "the uncertainty and sorrow and sacrifice" of the years since the September 11 attacks had "not been in vain".

 

"Millions have gained their liberty and millions more have gained the hope of liberty that will not be denied. The trumpet of freedom has been sounded and that trumpet never calls retreat," he said.

 

The most pointed words were reserved for the Syrian leader, President Bashar Assad, who on Saturday announced the start of a redeployment of 15,000 troops in Lebanon to the east of the country, but set no date for the complete withdrawal demanded by the US, France and Saudi Arabia.

 

"The Lebanese people have heard the speech by the Syrian president. They've seen these delaying tactics and half measures before," Mr Bush said.

 

"All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair."

 

Mr Bush did not threaten military action if Syria failed to comply.

 

Martha Kessler, a former CIA expert on Syria, warned that American pressure could produce a backlash. "The challenge here is for America not to go over a point where we are seen to impose a Pax Americana on the region. There is a huge constituency out there that sees this as a real power play. It's a very difficult line."

 

Daniel Byman, an expert on US national security and the Middle East at Georgetown University, said that free elections in Lebanon would have mixed results for US interests.

 

"There will be more seats controlled by Hizbullah's representation," Prof Byman said. "But there are also a large number of Syrian hacks in the . who are going to lose their jobs."

 

Both Ms Kessler and Prof Byman agreed that the White House might be underestimating the degree to which Syrian troops have been a force for stability in Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990, maintaining control over religious and ethnic groups.

 

Ms Kessler said: "I'm not predicting a resurgence of full-blown civil war - the circumstances have changed too much for that. But, renewed violence ... absolutely."

 

Mr Bush also echoed Israel's allegation that a suicide attack last month in Tel Aviv had been planned by Islamic Jihad militants based in Damascus.

 

 

[Guest guest]

We like the principle of freedom to practice our spiritual persuasion anywhere we choose, cause that's Gods way.

But we just don't like the self righteous guy on a so-called mission from God, to push millions of lives into the valley of death. Heavy responsibility when you wake up and realize, 'Oh my God what have I done?'

 

Oh well someone had to do it. World Muslim domination ain't a pretty option to dancing in the street.

 

'I'm really a peace-lovin', or is that piece-lovin' man, but someone keeps pullin' ma strings to do otherwise. I hear voices in maa head, who could that be now?'

 

There just seems to be something terribly immoral about a leader that continually withdraws to his holiday bunker to play golf in Texas, while an endless file of young boys fight and sacrifice their lives for him day after day.

 

But there is no doubt the whole world has had a crash course on Islam though, wonder when they are going to get one on Vaisnavism?

[Kulapavana]

"All I really know that there are many Krsna temples in America and devotees can go on Harinam procession in New York, Washington, etc...

 

But try going to Cairo, Riyadh or Damascus with your mrdrunga and cartels!:"

 

I lived and PREACHED KRISHNA CONSCIOUSNESS in communist Poland (where all such things were ILLEGAL) for years - still, the preaching was going very strong and many people joined. Now Poland is a "free" country and the preaching is getting worse and worse. what does it prove to YOU?

 

dont get suckered in by promises of "new preaching grounds" thanks to the blood of innocent people slaughtered for profit - it is abominable to think in these terms. and btw. Israel is a "democratic" country, yet the devotees face all kinds of obstacles there - such is the middle-eastern mentality of bigotry and primitive sectarianism. you think Arabs will be more receptive now, after getting "liberated" by the Americans? LOL!

 

In the 70's devotees could have hitchhiked from Europe all the way to India. Can they do it now or in the forseeable future? LoL! THIS is your "progress"!

 

[theist]

 

In the 70's devotees could have hitchhiked from Europe all the way to India. Can they do it now or in the forseeable future? LoL! THIS is your "progress"!

 

 

Maybe you need a different example, I used to hitchike everywhere, in the and up and down the west coast. It got too dangerous to do in the early seventies even.

 

[krsna]

 

 

/images/graemlins/confused.gif

 

Just like Walesa and Solidarity in Poland ?

[Kulapavana]

"Just like Walesa and Solidarity in Poland ?"

 

essentailly yes. red pigs were replaced with white pigs: a variety more corrupt and ruthless. I have been there several years ago and was shocked to see old pensioniers begging for pennies on the street and pornography shops everywhere downtown, along with 20%+ national unemployment rate (with over 50% unemployment in some parts of the country).

 

and comparing a country like Poland, with long (1200 years) national history (including centuries of relative democracy) to Middle East is very misleading.

 

US had no part in bringing democracy to Eastern Europe - not enough oil I guess.

[Kulapavana]

"Maybe you need a different example, I used to hitchike everywhere, in the and up and down the west coast. It got too dangerous to do in the early seventies even."

 

hitchiking or not, it used to be safe for Westerners to travel there, and we were welcome. right now American sailors have to worry about flying a US flag in every third world country they visit in their sailboats. US foreign policy is directly responsible for that.

 

[rand0M aXiS]

With Operation Urgent Fury -- the invasion of Grenada -- two decades ago, Cold War history began a dramatic turn that would lead in less than a decade to the demise of an empire. Ronald Reagan's clarity of vision, tenacity and unwavering beliefs led to the dismantling of America's most formidable foe.

 

Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan ordered American troops to invade Grenada and liberate the island from its ruling Marxist dictator. By itself this would have been an insignificant military action: Grenada is a tiny island of little geopolitical significance. But in reality the liberation of Grenada was a historic event, because it signaled the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine and inaugurated a sequence of events that brought down the Soviet empire itself.

 

The Brezhnev Doctrine stated simply that once a country went Communist, it would stay Communist. In other words, the Soviet empire would continue to advance and gain territory, but it would never lose any to the capitalist West. In 1980, when Reagan was elected president, the Brezhnev Doctrine was a frightening reality. Between 1974 and 1980, while the United States wallowed in post-Vietnam angst, 10 countries had fallen into the Soviet orbit: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada and Afghanistan. Never had the Soviets lost an inch of real estate to the West.

 

The liberation of Grenada changed that. For the first time, a Communist country had ceased to be Communist. Surely the Politburo in Moscow took notice of that. The Soviet leadership, we now know from later accounts, also noted that in Ronald Reagan the Americans had elected a new kind of president, one who had resolved not merely to "contain" but actually to "roll back" the Soviet empire.

 

Containment. Rollback. These sound like words from a very different era, and in a sense they are. With the sudden and spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union, we find ourselves in a new world. But how we got from there to here is still poorly understood. Oddly there is very little debate, even among historians, about how the Soviet empire collapsed so suddenly and unexpectedly. One reason for this, perhaps, is that many of the experts were embarrassingly wrong in their analysis and predictions about the future of the Soviet empire.

 

It is important to note that the doves or appeasers (the forerunners of today's antiwar movement) were wrong on every point. They showed a very poor understanding of the nature of communism. For example, when Reagan in 1983 called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," columnist Anthony Lewis of The New York Times became so indignant at Reagan's formulation that he searched through his repertoire for the appropriate adjective: "simplistic,sectarian,dangerous,outrageous." Finally Lewis settled on "primitive...the only word for it."

 

Writing during the mid-1980s, Strobe Talbott, then a journalist at Time and later an official in the Clinton State Department, faulted officials in the Reagan administration for espousing "the early fifties goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," an objective he considered unrealistic and dangerous. "Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end," Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind "it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live."

 

Historian Barbara Tuchman argued that instead of employing a policy of confrontation, the West should ingratiate itself with the Soviet Union by pursuing "the stuffed-goose option -- that is, providing them with all the grain and consumer goods they need." If Reagan had taken this advice when it was offered in 1982, the Soviet empire would probably still be around today.

 

The hawks or anti-Communists had a much better understanding of totalitarianism, and understood the necessity of an arms buildup to deter Soviet aggression. But they too were decidedly mistaken in their belief that Soviet communism was a permanent and virtually indestructible adversary. This Spenglerian gloom is conveyed by Whittaker Chambers' famous remark to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 that in abandoning communism he was "leaving the winning side for the losing side."

 

The hawks were also mistaken about what steps were needed in the final stage to bring about the dismantling of the Soviet empire. During Reagan's second term, when he supported Mikhail Gorbachev's reform efforts and pursued arms reduction agreements with him, many conservatives denounced his apparent change of heart. William F. Buckley urged Reagan to reconsider his positive assessment of the Gorbachev regime: "To greet it as if it were no longer evil is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler." George Will mourned that "Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy."

 

No one, and least of all an intellectual, likes to be proved wrong. Consequently there has been in the past decade a determined effort to rewrite the history of the Cold War. This revisionist view has now entered the textbooks, and is being pressed on a new generation that did not live through the Soviet collapse. There is no mystery about the end of the Soviet Union, the revisionists say, explaining that it suffered from chronic economic problems and collapsed of its own weight.

 

This argument is not persuasive. True, the Soviet Union during the 1980s suffered from debilitating economic problems. But these were hardly new: The Soviet regime had endured economic strains for decades, on account of its unworkable Socialist system. Moreover, why would economic woes in themselves bring about the end of the political regime? Historically, it is common for nations to experience poor economic performance, but never have food shortages or technological backwardness caused the destruction of a large empire. The Roman and Ottoman empires survived internal stresses for centuries before they were destroyed from the outside through military conflict.

 

Another dubious claim is that Mikhail Gorbachev was the designer and architect of the Soviet Union's collapse. Gorbachev was undoubtedly a reformer and a new kind of Soviet leader, but he did not wish to lead the party, and the regime, over the precipice. In his 1987 book Perestroika, Gorbachev presented himself as the preserver, not the destroyer, of socialism. Consequently, when the Soviet Union collapsed, no one was more surprised than Gorbachev.

 

 

[Kulapavana]

"US Won the Cold War and LIBERATED Eastern Europe"

 

are you really that naive? I was there when it happened and have quite a different perspective. You Americans seem to think you are tha best thing that happened to Mother Earth in this day of Brahma... /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[rand0M aXiS]

The man who got things right from the start was, at first glance, an unlikely statesman. He became the leader of the Free World with no experience in foreign policy. Some people thought he was a dangerous warmonger; others considered him a nice fellow but a bit of a bungler. Nevertheless, this California lightweight turned out to have as deep an understanding of communism as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This rank amateur developed a complex, often counterintuitive strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union, which hardly anyone on his staff fully endorsed or even understood. Through a combination of vision, tenacity, patience and improvisational skill, he produced what Henry Kissinger termed "the most stunning diplomatic feat of the modern era." Or as Margaret Thatcher put it, "Reagan won the cold war without firing a shot."

 

Reagan had a much more sophisticated understanding of communism than either the hawks or the doves. In 1981 he told an audience at the University of Notre Dame: "The West won't contain communism. It will transcend communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written." The next year, speaking to the British House of Commons, Reagan predicted that if the Western alliance remained strong it would produce a "march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history."

 

 

These prophetic assertions -- dismissed as wishful rhetoric at the time -- raise the question: How did Reagan know that Soviet communism faced impending collapse when the most perceptive minds of his time had no inkling of what was to come? To answer this question, the best approach is to begin with Reagan's jokes, which contain a profound analysis of the working of socialism. Over the years Reagan had developed an extensive collection of stories that he attributed to the Soviet people themselves.

 

 

One of Reagan's favorite stories concerned a man who goes to the Soviet bureau of transportation to order an automobile. He is informed that he will have to put down his money now, but there is a 10-year wait. The man fills out all the various forms, has them processed through the various agencies, and finally he gets to the last agency. He pays them his money and they say, "Come back in 10 years and get your car." He asks, "Morning or afternoon?" The man in the agency says, "We're talking about 10 years from now. What difference does it make?" He replies, "The plumber is coming in the morning."

 

 

Reagan could go on in this vein for hours. What is striking, however, is that his jokes were not about the evil of communism so much as they were about its incompetence. Reagan agreed with the hawks that the Soviet experiment, which sought to transform human nature and create a "new man," was immoral. At the same time, he saw that it was also basically foolish. Reagan did not need a Ph.D. in economics to recognize that any economy based upon centralized planners dictating how much factories should produce, how much people should consume and how social rewards should be distributed was doomed to disastrous failure. For Reagan the Soviet Union was a "sick bear," and the question was not whether it would collapse, but when.

 

Sick bears, however, can be very dangerous. They tend to lash out. What resources they cannot find at home, they seek elsewhere. Moreover, since we are not discussing animals but people, there is also the question of pride. The leaders of an internally weak empire are not likely to acquiesce to an erosion of their power. They typically turn to their primary source of strength: the military.

 

 

Appeasement, Reagan was convinced, would only increase the bear's appetite and invite further aggression. Thus he agreed with the anti-Communist strategy for dealing firmly with the Soviets. But he was more confident than most hawks in his belief that Americans were up to the challenge. "We must realize," he said in his first inaugural address, "that...no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women." What was most visionary about Reagan's view was that it rejected the assumption of Soviet immutability. At a time when no one else could, Reagan dared to imagine a world in which the Communist regime in the Soviet Union did not exist.

 

It is one thing to envision this happy state, and quite another to bring it about. The Soviet bear was in a ravenous mood when Reagan entered the White House. In the 1970s the Soviets had made rapid advances in Asia, Africa and South America, culminating with the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Moreover, the Soviet Union had built the most formidable nuclear arsenal in the world. The Warsaw Pact also had overwhelming superiority over NATO in its conventional forces. Finally, Moscow had recently deployed a new generation of intermediate-range missiles, the giant SS-20s, targeted at European cities.

 

 

Reagan did not merely react to these alarming events; he developed a broad counteroffensive strategy. He initiated a $1.5 trillion military buildup, the largest in American peacetime history, which was aimed at drawing the Soviets into an arms race he was convinced they could not win. He was also determined to lead the Western alliance in deploying 108 Pershing II and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles in Europe to counter the SS-20s. At the same time, Reagan did not eschew arms control negotiations. Indeed, he suggested that for the first time the two superpowers drastically reduce their nuclear stockpiles. If the Soviets would withdraw their SS-20s, the United States would not proceed with the Pershing and Tomahawk deployments. This was called the "zero option."

 

Then there was the Reagan Doctrine, which involved military and material support for indigenous resistance movements struggling to overthrow Soviet-sponsored tyrannies. The administration supported such guerrillas in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola and Nicaragua. In addition, it worked with the Vatican and the international wing of the AFL-CIO to keep alive the Polish trade union Solidarity, despite a ruthless crackdown by General Wojciech Jaruzelski's regime. In 1983, U.S. troops invaded Grenada, ousting the Marxist government and holding free elections. Finally, in March 1983 Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a new program to research and eventually deploy missile defenses that offered the promise, in Reagan's words, of "making nuclear weapons obsolete."

 

 

 

At every stage Reagan's counteroffensive strategy was denounced by the doves. The "nuclear freeze" movement became a potent political force in the early 1980s by exploiting public fears that Reagan's military buildup was leading the world closer to nuclear war. Reagan's zero option was dismissed by Strobe Talbott, who said it was "highly unrealistic" and offered "more to score propaganda points...than to win concessions from the Soviets." With the exception of support for the Afghan mujahedin, a cause that enjoyed bipartisan support, every other effort to aid anti-Communist rebels fighting to liberate their countries from Marxist, Soviet-backed regimes was resisted by doves in Congress and the media. SDI was denounced, in the words of The New York Times, as "a projection of fantasy into policy."

 

 

 

 

 

The Soviet Union was equally hostile to the Reagan counteroffensive, but its understanding of Reagan's objectives was far more perceptive than that of the doves. Commenting on the Reagan arms buildup, the Soviet journal Izvestiya protested, "They want to impose on us an even more ruinous arms race." General Secretary Yuri Andropov alleged that Reagan's missile defense program was "a bid to disarm the Soviet Union." The seasoned diplomat Andrei Gromyko charged that "behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources...and therefore will be forced to surrender." These reactions are important because they establish the context for Mikhail Gorbachev's ascent to power in early 1985. Gorbachev was indeed a new breed of Soviet general secretary, utterly unlike any of his predecessors, but few have asked why he was appointed by the Old Guard. The main reason is that the Politburo had come to recognize the failure of past Soviet strategies.

 

The Soviet leadership, which initially dismissed Reagan's promise of rearmament as mere saber-rattling rhetoric, seems to have been stunned by the scale and pace of the Reagan military buildup. The Pershing and Tomahawk deployments were, to the Soviets, an unnerving demonstration of the unity and resolve of the Western alliance. Through the Reagan Doctrine, the United States had completely halted Soviet advances in the Third World -- since Reagan assumed office, no more territory had fallen into Moscow's hands. Indeed, one small nation, Grenada, had moved back into the democratic camp. Thanks to Stinger missiles supplied by the United States, Afghanistan was rapidly becoming what the Soviets would themselves later call a "bleeding wound." Then there was Reagan's SDI program, which invited the Soviets into a new kind of arms race that they could scarcely afford, and one that they would probably lose. Clearly the Politburo saw that the momentum in the Cold War had dramatically shifted. After 1985, the Soviets seem to have decided to try something different.

 

It was Reagan, in other words, who seems to have been largely responsible for inducing a loss of nerve that caused Moscow to seek a new approach. Gorbachev's assignment was not merely to find a new way to deal with the country's economic problems but also to figure out how to cope with the empire's reversals abroad. For this reason, Ilya Zaslavsky, who served in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, said later that the true originator of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) was not Mikhail Gorbachev but Ronald Reagan.

 

 

 

 

 

Gorbachev was widely admired by Western intellectuals and pundits because the new Soviet leader was attempting to achieve the great 20th-century hope of the Western intelligentsia: communism with a human face! A socialism that worked! Yet as Gorbachev discovered, and the rest of us now know, it could not be done. The vices Gorbachev sought to eradicate from the system turned out to be essential features of the system. If Reagan was the Great Communicator, then Gorbachev turned out to be, as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, the Grand Miscalculator. The hard-liners in the Kremlin who warned Gorbachev that his reforms would cause the entire system to blow up were right.

 

But Gorbachev had one redeeming quality: He was a decent and relatively open-minded fellow. Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader who came from the post-Stalin generation, the first to admit openly that the promises of Lenin were not being fulfilled. Reagan, like Margaret Thatcher, was quick to recognize that Gorbachev was different.

 

Even so, as they sat across the table in Geneva in November 1985, Reagan knew that Gorbachev would be a tough negotiator. Setting aside State Department briefing books full of diplomatic language, Reagan confronted Gorbachev directly. "What you are doing in Afghanistan in burning villages and killing children," he said. "It's genocide, and you are the one who has to stop it." At this point, according to aide Kenneth Adelman, who was present, Gorbachev looked at Reagan with a stunned expression, apparently because no one had talked to him this way before.

 

 

 

 

 

Reagan also threatened Gorbachev. "We won't stand by and let you maintain weapon superiority over us," he told him. "We can agree to reduce arms, or we can continue the arms race, which I think you know you can't win." The extent to which Gorbachev took Reagan's remarks to heart became obvious at the October 1986 Reykjavik summit. There Gorbachev astounded the arms control establishment in the West by accepting Reagan's zero option.

 

Yet Gorbachev had one condition, which he unveiled at the very end: The United States must agree not to deploy missile defenses. Reagan refused. The press immediately went on the attack. "Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains," read the banner headline in The Washington Post. "Sunk by Star Wars," Time's cover declared. To Reagan, however, SDI was more than a bargaining chip; it was a moral issue. In a televised statement from Reykjavik he said, "There was no way I could tell our people that their government would not protect them against nuclear destruction." Polls showed that most Americans supported him.

 

 

 

 

 

Reykjavik, Margaret Thatcher said, was the turning point in the Cold War. Finally Gorbachev realized that he had a choice: Continue a no-win arms race, which would utterly cripple the Soviet economy, or give up the struggle for global hegemony, establish peaceful relations with the West, and work to enable the Soviet economy to become prosperous like the Western economies. After Reykjavik, Gorbachev seemed to have settled on this latter course.

 

Additional Sources:

www.psywarrior.com

teachpol.tcnj.edu

www.gavle.to

www.reagan.dk

history.acusd.edu

[Kulapavana]

"A History Lesson for the Ignorant"

 

the lessons in history vary according to WHO WRITES THE HISTORY BOOKS - so says my father, who is a respected PhD historian with many scholarly books to his credit.

 

Communism and Russia had it's own dynamic of decay and their ruling elites came up with a very interesting strategy for the "transfer of power". Eastern Europe was a mixed bag of special cases, with dynamics only partially dependent on those of Soviet Union. While the Cold War certainly had some influence on Soviet Union, the changes in it's power structure were caused mostly by internal factors. Russia could have remained communist if their power elites wanted to do so. Who would have stopped them? US? he he... they could not even win in Viet-nam /images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

anyway, this world is a much darker place than most people think and sometimes things are not what they seem to be. ... and ignorance shows itself in many ways.

[theist]

and thanks dasanudas_das for the posting.

[krsna]

k

 

Reagan is remembered for his June 1987 performance in front of the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

 

/images/graemlins/grin.gif /images/graemlins/grin.gif /images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[Guest guest]

Yeah, he had our help, but russia was crushed because they tried to reel in the islamists in Afghanistan. The forces that defeated russia then are led by the same dude that ELUDES us today, not saddam, not yasser, not the ayatollah nor the syrian regime. It is the folks who want to live as they did 1300 years ago, led by OBL. How can we defeat those who think that death in war is glorious?

 

Russians did not want to get nuked, but OBL would love for us to nuke someone, because their numbers would grow exponentially if we resorted to that. OBL loved our invasion of his great enemy, saddam, the stalinist.

 

Reagan did not defeat russia, russia self destructed. reagan didnt even know his own name at the end. He presided over wanton death squads in CA, SEA, and south asia. He destroyed US economy, just as GWB is doing now.

 

thanks reagan, for nancy, maybe, but not for any other crimes you committed.

[rand0M aXiS]

Theist. And thanks for your sanity in a sometimes crazy space. My posts are for the openminded devotees, not those whose minds are contaminated with socialism, whose days are numbered.

[sumedh]

you mean "sanity" and "openminded" as in agreeing with your perspective

 

haribol

[Guest guest]

Not for agreeing with my position, but for not being a crazy hate-America, blame America, envious Euroweenie. I can disagree with all kinds of material/relative politics or viewpoints, but I refuse to discuss anything with the moonbats who are infected with OSS (Oliver Stone Syndrome).

[rand0M aXiS]

Forgot to log in.