DISQUS

But bin Laden did attack us, did he not? Did that attack make US defenses against such attacks better? It would seem not from your argument that there are at least as many problems with the defenses as there were before, so the sole rationale about your wishing for another attack would be mostly to prove that you were right. I mean, aside from all the dead people, of course.

I took a course with a major soviet adivsor to D presidents.

It was hawkish Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski who had the bright idea of funding the Afghan religious fighters to try to bring down the Soviet Union in 1978 by embroiling it in a Vietnam on its own borders. Of course they pleaded all innocent when the USSR accused the CIA of funding a war on their borders, and acted outraged that the Red Army moved across the border in exactly the reaction they were hoping for (thus leading to the aforementioned halting of grain shipments and the refusal to participate in the Moscow Olympics).

If you thought a Soviet advisor to Democratic presidents either represents the view of the left or would give you an accurate portrayal of what the left thought about the Soviet Union, you're horribly mistaken. The guys running foreign policy in this country on both sides of the aisle were pretty much all buggy where the USSR was concerned. Practically the entire foreign policy staff of 1972 Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen Scoop Jackson became Reagan Republicans, and you'd probably recognize their names: Richard Perle, William Kristol, Frank Gaffney, Elliott Abrams.

I guess the difference between you and I is that I didn't just rely on what I heard from people to know what was going on (are you sure your last initial isn't F, Tom?) I read stuff. Sure, the predominant thought in the nation was that the Soviets were so powerful they could drop into Colorado with the Cubans to back them up at any time, but the fact that they were having so much trouble in Afghanistan keeping their troops supplied was covered in the venues I read.

Are you saying that Reagan didn’t predict, in this first term, that the Soviet Union was on the brink of demise due to its internal flaws? Are you saying that “intelligent opinion” on the left didn’t generally disparage this view?

Yeah, I am saying that.

Reagan promoted the image of the USSR as powerful foe. The "bear" ad, the urgent need for the SDI program, the various extralegal measures they took to fund any operation they saw as combatting the Soviets.

I suppose you're taking the same tack as Dinesh D'Souza who credits Reagan with some sort of unique prescience that the Soviet Union was failing in one of his books, but I suspected they were in trouble myself as a college undergraduate, just by reading about the shortages of goods in stores in Moscow in the late '70s and early '80s. I live in a state where the suspension of grain shipments to the Soviet Union in 1980 (even before Reagan was elected) was a big deal. A big country like the USSR with a breadbasket region like the Ukraine importing basic foodstuffs like grain? From the US? You'd have to have had your head up your ideological ass not to know that there was something wrong.

Tom K, Reagan and his buddies portrayed the Soviet Union as a dire threat that would take over the world. The whole notion of supplying the contras was based on the concept that Nicaragua would become a Communist beachhead in the Americas from which Soviet tanks could drive through a thousand miles of Mexico and be on the border of Brownsville, Texas in 48 hours. I did live through those years, I remember how incredibly stupid those claims sounded back then, and I remember the people who made them in the mid-80s were certainly not on the left.

31 March 1986: TIME Magazine cover featuring Daniel Ortega and the cover line "The Man Who Makes Reagan See Red"

Look it up yourself.

The assumption about a majority of young people being "liberal and anti-nuke" was never valid.

This skit came out a month and a half after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election, after all. According to exit polls, 43% of the voters in both the 18-21 and 22-29 age groups voted for Reagan. Carter got 44% and 43% respectively. Not every Carter voter would have been a liberal. Carter was a conservative, Southern Democrat. Even in 1976, the first election after Watergate, the under-30 vote was only a few points different between the two major parties (Ford actually got more of the 18-21 vote than Carter that year).

People forget that hippies and liberals were never anywhere close to a majority of their demographic.

So Tom K., I think that your analysis may be skewed by an inaccurate grasp of the reality. Certainly the idea that Reagan "freed" anyone from dictatorship can itself be laughed at. Anyone who knew what was going on in the USSR could see that the state was collapsing of its own weight in the early '80s, but Reagan and his buddies were so blind to that fact that they were completely taken by surprise when it started falling apart. It was Iraq war planning writ large.