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To: blake_paterson who wrote (62263)	12/4/2000 1:44:12 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Blake, Many of my close relatives are refugees from the Soviet Union. The Soviet view was that they wanted a buffer between themselves and Western Europe to avoid a repeat of the loss of many tens of millions of lives from invasion, as happened in WWI and WWII. They invaded Poland, Hungary and Chechoslavakia to this end. They did not trust the Americans either, and were at least as fearful of our nuclear capability as we were of them. Both governments fed their citizenry with unwarranted paranoia about the intentions of the other. There is little evidence that the Soviet's posture went much beyond defensive. Scumbria

To: blake_paterson who wrote (62263)	12/4/2000 3:52:36 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi blake_paterson; At the time, the conflicts in SE Asia, and South America seemed important, but the seeds of the destruction of the Soviet Union had already been sown (largely by Nixon opening the iron curtain), and the cold war would have turned out the same regardless of what happened in those unimportant corners of the world. As far as violence being extreme to those on the receiving end, I agree, but the context is what is significant to the operation of the American government. While Clinton can say that he feels our pain, there is no way that he is even aware of it when we feel a knife in our entrails, it is our own pain. Compared to the destruction of WW2, even Vietnam and Korea were minor, unimportant incidents. When you see the way that the history books will cover all this, 1000 years from now, what I say will be obvious. They won't even bother to mention Nicaragua. Instead, they'll say something to the effect that the democracies were forced into war in 1914, with various shifting alliances, but that they didn't actually complete their goal of making the world safe for Democracy until 75 years later with the fall of the Berlin wall. Our own understanding of the Peloponnesian war is similar, now that a couple thousand years have gone by, time gives a much better vantage point. -- Carl