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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (682308)	5/14/2005 8:54:45 PM
From: Rock_nj	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769667

The most idiotic thing I have ever heard.....the Soviet Union was NOT a threat?!?! It's pretty obvious that the Soviet Union certainly wasn't the threat we were led to believe it was during the Cold War. I'm not saying they weren't a threat at all, but for example, there was no serious threat of a Soviet invasion of the United States. I mean, most security experts agreed that once the atom bomb was invented that threat of invasion from the Soviets was over. Besides, why exactly would the Soviets want to invade the U.S. anyway? They had their hands full with their own country and satelittes. The last thing they needed was an invasion and occupation of a country with a completely different culture and economic system. I'd say the Soviets were more of a threat to our economic interests abroad, such as oil in the Middle East, and that is why we really engaged them in the Cold War, and of course, to feed the Military Industrial Complex (nothing like an enemy to feed their appetite). Also, it has been documented that the CIA dramatically overestimated the Soviet "threat" during the later Cold War years, and this was done for political reasons, to keep the money flowing to the Military Industrial Complex. This is why the CIA was supposedly caught off guard when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990-1991. Some astute observers within the CIA saw the pending collapse of the Soviet Union, but that was not the policy that the Reagan/Bush team wanted exposed, so the assessments from the CIA continued to paint a dire threat from the Soviet Union up until it simply vanished. Kind of like the overstated threat posed by terrorists in our modern era. Sure, we need to fight them and try to prevent something catostrophic from occuring, but in reality the average American Joe/Jane is threaten far more by something as mundane as street crime than foreign terrorists. If we really want to protect our citizens, we should ensure our police are well staffed and have the resouces to do their jobs properly.