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

To: epicure who wrote (96806)	3/1/2005 11:28:15 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Just saw this post. So you're saying the USSR was useful as a lure which drew the islamists to attack them vs us - "the islamic militants had another focus". I see the rationale employed there but it ignores the fact that the USSR was a greater danger to us than the Islamists and assumes the islamist movement would have developed the same way absent an Afghan invasion - would Al Qaeda have even developed at all without the Afghan invasion as a radicalizing cause? We're into what-if alternate history territory here. I think it more likely that without 1) the Afghan invasion and without 2) Saddam's invasions of Iran and Kuwait, Al Qaeda would never have developed. Both 1 and 2 can be laid at the feet of the Soviet Union. The Afghan invasion was clear Soviet imperial aggression. And Saddam's wars with Iran and Kuwait wouldn't have happened had he not had a major power supplying him with arms - namely the Soviet Union. "..but I can point to historical evidence that leaders of our country (republicans, too) have seen the benefit of Saddam" OK, now you're making an historical argument. There were a few politicians who pursued that idea for a time in the '80's. Course I would say those politicians who imagined that Saddam might fill a role useful to us, were foolishly short-sighted in that judgment. And we shouldn't carry that argument too far. We never displaced the role the USSR played with Iraq as the paltry level of US arms sales to Iraq in this period shows (they were mostly "dual use" type weapons - helicopters in particular.) "I would argue that many of the ethnic conflicts in the republics were much less severe when all ethnicities had the Russians to hate." Well they still can hate Russians as they have ethnic Russians in their countries. But the ethnic conflicts in the republics aren't that bad. You mention Tatars, Chechens, and Ingush - these are Russian republic nationalities - not in the Stans. "Nukes have been transferred back to Russia- but I would feel safer if the USSR was still the USSR so that things weren't so in flux. I prefer one large known enemy, to many less predictable ones. I don't think you can argue that the USSR did not keep the republics under control- at least as far as we were concerned. " Of course, the USSR had all those nukes regardless of their location aimed at us all ready to fire. Russia does not today. As far as the USSR keeping the republics under control, the republics aren't problems for us. In fact, we have good relations with most of them. Indeed, we mostly have decent relations with Russia as well. "There was one foreign policy coming from Russia, instead of - how many are there now?" The fact that there are now a bunch of countries each with their own policy is not a problem for us because each of the current foreign policies is mostly friendly to us. The one foreign policy of the USSR era, OTOH, was overtly hostile to us and our interests worldwide. Still you are leaning way overboard to see something positive for us in the existence of the Soviet empire. And overlooking the massive negative the Soviet Union represented for the US.