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

To: Neocon who wrote (86021)	8/22/2000 1:40:26 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I think it's less an issue of stupidity or bad faith than ignorance and the prevalence of ideology over honesty. We allowed foreign policy to fall into the hands of ideologues; responsibility for the consequences must be shared by the ideologues and those who allowed them to wield unchallenged power. The typical result was that people whose ideology forced them to interpret all political events through a left-right paradigm, and more specifically through a Soviet vs. US paradigm, imposed that paradigm on situations which were actually far more complex. A classic example would be attributing the fall of Somoza to Soviet adventurism, which is simply absurd. Certainly the Soviets saw which way the tide was flowing, and exploited it, but we handed the situation to them on a platter by supporting a clearly unsustainable dictatorship. All too often the ones making the decisions were not the ones "on the ground". Again, look to China for an example. The American intelligence officers who were on the ground at the close of WWII reported that Chiang Kai-Shek's government had no popular support and no ability to govern, and was bound to fall. They reported that only the communists had the political and military apparatus in place to succeed Chiang, and that short of military intervention, which was unthinkable, there was nothing we could do to prevent Mao from taking power. They also suggested that Mao would not necessarily ally with the Soviets, that a working relationship between Mao and the US was possible, and that since he was going to win in any event, such a relationship should be established. Their reports were unacceptable to the armchair ideologues in Washington, so they were purged, and replaced with more ideologically acceptable individuals. Asian policy suffered hugely as a result. Ideology and intelligence work, as I've said before, are simply not compatible.