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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (56350)	9/28/1999 7:21:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Again, you seem to be shifting the discussion from result to motive. Of course the Soviets went into Afghanistan to further their own objectives, but once there their presence threatened nobody's security but their own. It certainly did not boost their aggressive capacity toward the middle east; if anything it did the opposite. The Soviets did not arm Iraq out of the goodness of their hearts, but that does not mean that the Iraqis were ever an effective or reliable Soviet proxy, or that this policy increased the Soviet threat to middle east oil. Do we respond to the intent of a policy or to what it actually accomplishes? The Latin American situation was of course intimately tied up with our insistence on imposing the east-west/left-right dichotomy on nations which were involved in a different struggle altogether, the attempt to throw off the shackles of colonialism and neocolonial feudalism. Our insistence on maintaining "order" at the expense of progress - which is necessarily accompanied by a degree of chaos - put us on the losing side of these conflicts over and over again. Our Eurocentrism is just another way of putting our past ahead of our future; it has cost us dearly. We traded Indochina back to the French in return for French support in Europe, but what did the French ever do for us in Europe that was worth the mess in Vietnam? We removed Mossadegh from Iran in response to the absurd British contention that he was a Soviet pawn. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company retained control, and what did we get? The joy of dealing with Khomeini. North/South struggle received short shrift in the US and Europe, but in the former colonies it was much more real than East/West. Being enslaved by history is as dangerous as ignoring it. The French and British went into the second world war prepared for the first, and were nearly destroyed as a consequence. If it weren't for the basic fact that socialism was incapable of sustaining a viable domestic economy, we might well be in the same position today. We prevailed - in my opinion - less because of our strength than because of the weakness inherent in their system.