"Republicans just don’t do foreign policy very well."
Ms. Marsh digs under the myth of Don Renaldo, the Gipper, to show how the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a result of policies pursued by the Regan Administration in area in the salad days of Republican Anti-Communist gamesmanship. Once the Soviet Union collapsed there was no further use for the Taliban for Afghanistan itself as a pawn in the "Great Game" of Central Asia.
There is a deliberate irony in Taylor Marsh's words as the Elephant Party has run on its supposed superiority in foreign affairs since Nixon. Both Carter and Clinton were savaged for their naivete on international policy and their supposed weakness on National Security matters. For some reason Carter gets more abuse than Clinton even though Carter in total had more success than the man from Hope. What a difference a hostage crisis makes.
Regan on the other hand gets nothing but love because he was in office when the Soviet Union finally collapsed from it own contradiction. Pay no attention to Regan and Bush abandoning huge swaths of the world to their own devices. Pay no attention to the damage done to societies South of the border. Pay absolutely no attention to the blowback in places like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Uruguay. The anti-American policies of both Osama Bin Laden and Hugo Chavez have their roots in the excesses of Regan's anti-Communist policies.
2 comments:
Osama bin Laden's problems with the US do NOT stem from the anti-communist polices of Ronald Reagan. That is utter nonsense.
Have you read what Bin Laden wrote?
He marked two things, women in the US military in Saudi Arabia and the Zionist agenda of America----NOT anti-communist agenda!
Who cares what Hugo Chavez says or wants, the man is tin hat blowhard dictator. Who Cares! So he foams at the mouth.
The Soviet Union collapsed because of the monetary, financial stress that RR put it thru---in other words the Capitalist society buried the Communist Utopian society.
Your grasp of geopolitics is awfully skewered. Most if not all the problems in the Middle East, 9/11 is solely due to the existence of Israel, Israel, Israel. That and nothing else. If it wasn't for Israel---It would be mighty quiet around here.
W Lindsay
Re-read the history of both the Carter and Regan Administrations vis Afghanistan. Carter began the covert funding of jihadist to destabilized the Soviet Puppet regime in Kabul. Regan took that effort and magnified it several fold. OBL began his life as an Anti-Soviet, anti-communist fighter in the badlands of the Hindu Kush. He served as a conduit for arms and money to the Mujaheddin warriors who were doing the real fighting and dying. He helped the CIA arm the holy warriors with the RPGs that brought down the Hind Helicopters the Soviets used in their COIN operations.
Without the support of the CIA OBL would never have been able to grow Al Queda into the organization it became on 9/11.
OBL is the unintended consequence of policies of Carter, Regan and Bush. It was mainly Regan and Bush's decision to abandon Afghanistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union that set up the long civil war in that nation and the eventual victory of the Taliban just prior to 9/11.
OBL turned against the USA right around the first Gulf War. He became very upset when the Saudi Monarchy decides to let "crusader force" defend the soil of the nation rather than OBL's holy warrior. Also OBL's brand of hard-line salafi extremism while usefully anti-Communist was always anti-Western too. The USA ignored that bothersome fact so it could use OBL's fighters as cannon fodder and proxies in it cold war. games. The US never bothered to examine the ideology behind the effective it was employing. Thus when OBL flipped from being anti-Soviet to being anti-American our government was caught flat-footed because it never understood OBL's underlying anti-western views.
You also forget the pivotal role Mikhail Gorbachev had in bringing an end to the Soviet Empire. Regan only made speeches about tearing down the Berlin Wall ; Gorby actually made it happen. RR and his administration was taken aback by the reforms of last Soviet. If another place-holder like Andropov faced RR the wall might still be standing. Regan's "victory" was mainly Gorby's doing. The Soviet Union mainly broke on the internal contradiction of Gorbachev's attempt to make Communism a more humane and rational system of government. RR had the good fortune to occupy the White House when the whole structure imploded.
One last thing, if Israel (or at least the Jewish population) were suddenly transported to Miami Beach the Middle East would still be a soup sandwich. After a week of celebration ( a months tops) the huddled Arab masses would come to the stark realization that they still live in nations created at the beginning of the 20th century by a small group of British and French imperialists. They would realize they are still ruled by the same bunch of corrupt, kleptocratic elites who are educated at Cambridge or Paris. Without the Zionist to hate they would return to the old patterns of distrust and rancor that inform the Shia-Sunni split. So instead of blowing up the odd Israeli cafe patron they would turn to blowing up the odd group of Sufi mystics or Ismaili heretics. The central issue of the Near East or Middle East is the fact that most of the nation states in the area have no real legitimacy being creations of British Cartographers and adventurers. Israel is merely the symptom of a much larger disease.
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