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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (133223)	2/21/2001 3:59:42 AM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1570453

Hi Scumbria, I recall a post of yours where you had said the USSR collapse was due to their own internal issues and that it had nothing to do with Reagan's build-up of military spending (even though some folks on this thread had perceived it to be). Your comment was well articulated. Thank you for providing an alternative view that questioned other people's view. Here are some quotes that essentially duplicate your comments, by someone who would surely know, Melvin Goodman, a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the CIA, where he worked for two decades (1966-1986). cnn.com Probably the greatest failure in the history of the CIA is the error with regard to exaggerating the size and the strength and the capabilities and the intentions of the Soviet Union. And I think this failure was a direct result of the greatest cultural change in the history of the CIA, which took place in 1981, when finally you got a very ideological individual, [William Casey], running the CIA, with a strong ideological and policy agenda with regard to the CIA, who introduced the notion that we are not going to say or introduce any intelligence to the policy process that talks about Soviet weakness or Soviet conciliation or Soviet interest in negotiation. So from 1981 on, and certainly throughout most of the two Reagan terms, you only got intelligence out of the CIA that talked about the strength of the Soviet Union, the perfidy of the Soviet Union, the threatening nature of the Soviet Union. And all of the intelligence that supported the notion that the Soviets were weak and that the economy was in trouble, and that military procurement was coming down and that the interest in arms control was great, and that the signals for a [Soviet] strategic retreat were in place -- this kind of intelligence could not get outside of the building to go to the White House. ... I believe there is a myth out there that the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended because of a series of very high American budgets, that the Soviets were forced to capitulate because they were no longer able to compete with the United States. The intelligence certainly does not support that assumption. And I know of no conversation that any of the major players of the Reagan Administration ever conducted, in which they actually said, "We are spending all of this money on our military arsenal because we're trying to force the capitulation of the Soviet Union." The arms spending had a life of its own. And the collapse of the Soviet Union is a very complicated phenomenon that had a life of its own. The collapse, I think, was primarily for political and economic reasons that were quite internal. This was a bankrupt society, both in its political meaning and in its economic capabilities. And here is where the CIA really missed the boat. ... The Soviet Union collapsed like a house of cards because it WAS a house of cards. And that's what the CIA never understood, for ideological reasons. ... Once policymakers decide on a course, I don't think correct intelligence or incorrect intelligence is going to bring any great changes in that course. Ronald Reagan's first term was devoted to a military buildup. If all of the intelligence the CIA could have produced got to Ronald Reagan, he would have found other justifications for his buildup. I think policy has its own energy and its own dynamics.