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4.20.2003
Those Were the Best of Times, the Worst of Times James Woolsey, former CIA director calls for Cold War, Part 2 Former CIA director, Woolsey has a great idea, he wants to take the strategy from the Cold War days and apply them to the new War on Terrorism. Victory in this world war will depend not only on our skill in battle and our effectiveness in rolling up terrorist cells. It will depend on our being able to split as many potential adherents as possible away from our main totalitarian enemies: Sunni Islamists (al Qaeda, its fellow travelers and financiers), Shiite Islamists (Tehran's mullahs, Hezbollah), and Syria, Libya, and Sudan (each with a somewhat different ideological cover story to justify oppression). We will not be able to do this by being feckless--a terrorist prosecution here, a cruise missile there. We have tried that, and it brought us Sept. 11. The democracies must rather change the face of the Middle East, as they have changed Europe. I only have one problem with this line of reasoning. The Cold War days were a shameful period, one in which the United States earned its reputation for being a bully. This wonderful time brought us McCarthy, Hollywood blacklists, the Vietnam War, the Korean War and a divided penisula, the assasination of Allende, continuous meddling in Latin America, Iran-Contra, the brutal bombing of Guatemala, the support of Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq, our funding of islamists in Afghanistan, the Islamic backlash in Iran, the demonization of the Russian people, runaway nuclear proliferation, the Cuban missile crisis, Richard Nixon, "Under God" in the pledge, right wing extremism and much more... What new enemnies will we create in our single-minded drive to defeat "Terrorism"? Mr. Woolsey seems to think our lackluster approach to the world brought us Sept. 11th. I tend to think it was our heavy handed one instead, one that poured money to the future terrorists as they fought our "then" enemy, the Communists. Will we be creating more future monsters to defeat current ones Mr. Woolsey? So while not saying that everything that happened in the period of the Cold War was a result of our War on Communism, I would say its safe to say that our paranoia of Communism and our single focus on that one thing as the source of all evil led us to make some really horrible decisions and has contributed in large part to the disarray the world is in now. As it turns out the Russian people aren't trying to eat our baby's brains, they are just normal people, admirable even, who wanted nothing more than to live in peace as well. The danger came from the governments of both countries and their opposition which drove each to commit crimes against all of humanity. If there are lessons to be learned from the Cold War period, invading people to impose freedom was not one of them. | |
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