3. Yet no problem of American foreign policy is more urgent than that of formulating a morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments who are threatened by ...subversion.
Oh Jeane, playing apologist to repressive authoritarian regimes as usual - well,
"our" repressive authoritarian regimes, anyway. Sadly for her, there is no morally acceptable way of dealing with brutal dictatorships - as her time with Reagan demonstrated, they went for "strategically" acceptable ways, ie. selling weapons to the here-much-maligned Iranian regime and engaging in a brutal war of terror against Nicaragua, in her two examples.
In either which case, I'm glad Reagan had her as an adviser, he absolutely needed her strong moral compass to determine just how much more moral it was to financially and politically support the overwhelmingly benign Saddam Hussein against those evil Ayatollahs! I mean, anyone else would've thought "Hey, this guy is brutally murdering the opposition and committing a genocide against a minority" - but FUCK, Jeane could at least see that unlike those evil Ayatollahs he didn't have such an unruly beard - and at least he didn't depose our benign, benevolent, bleeding-heart friend the Shah, who, I mean, c'mon, he may have had private armies that swore loyalty to him over the nation and he may have suspended democracy indefinitely, and he may have used police forces that were too harsh and brutal, but hey, he sent his kids over here! That's gotta count for something. We'll convince him to democratize eventually - right?
If only, just if only the Iranian people had waited a little longer, I'm sure Ms. Kirkpatrick would've convinced the Shah to bring democracy to Iran, because, really, he wasn't so bad. Just like she would've definitely done with her good friend (literally) her good friend General Leopoldo Galtieri, Butcher of Buenos Air- oh, I'm sorry, benign autocrat of Argentina, who started a pointless war against Great Britain so that his constituency would forget about the fact that he "disappeared" thousands of people for thinking the wrong way. But hey, we all make mistakes, and nobody's perfect.
Anyway, I dunno about you PoliticalChic, but people can only take it up the ass by brutal dictatorships for so long before shit hits the fan. Obama is not "losing" Egypt. Egypt is fighting for its freedom from a brutal 30-year dictatorship that your President's timid statements almost implicitly support. You're suggesting he should do more? You're suggesting that the US government should go ahead and send some emergency stealth planes to save the sclerotic, corrupt regime of an 82-year old autocrat?
And then you'll wonder "Why do they hate us?"
You guys just don't get it, do you.
Another populous, pivotal nation falling away from the Western sphere...another piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the Middle East...
You don't see the effects on terrorism, how this will guarantee attacks on our nation. "By the age of 14, Ayman al-Zawahiri had joined the Muslim Brotherhood....often described as a "lieutenant" to Osama bin Laden,..."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri
Some of you fellas never studied contemporary history...some, and this is worse, are wilfully blind because you can see the fingerprints of the left on this fiasco.
You mean like THIS history PC?
Reagan's Osama Connection
How he turned a jihadist into a terrorist kingpin.
Gorbachev took the helm as the reform-minded general-secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985. Within months, he had decided privately to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan.
At a Politburo meeting of Nov. 13, 1986, Gorbachev laid his position on the table: The war wasn't working; it had to be stopped:
People ask: "What are we doing there?" Will we be there endlessly? Or should we end this war? ... The strategic objective is to finish the war in one, maximum two years, and withdraw the troops. We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the process, so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.
In early December, Gorbachev summoned President Najibullah, the puppet leader of Afghanistan, to give him the news: The Soviet troops would be leaving within 18 months; after that, he was on his own.
Two months later, on Feb. 23, 1987, Gorbachev assured the Politburo that the troops wouldn't leave right away. He first had to foster a stable environment for the reigning government and to maintain a credible image with India, the Soviet Union's main ally in the region. The exit strategy, he said, would be a negotiated deal with Washington: The Soviets pull out troops; the Americans stop their arms shipments to the rebels.
However, within days, Gorbachev learned to his surprise that Reagan had no interest in such a deal. In a conversation on Feb. 27 with Italy's foreign minister, Giulio Andreotti, Gorbachev said, "We have information from very reliable sources Â… that the United States has set itself the goal of obstructing a settlement by any means," in order "to present the Soviet Union in a bad light." If this information is true, Gorbachev continued, the matter of a withdrawal "takes on a different light."
Without U.S. cooperation, Gorbachev couldn't proceed with his plans to withdraw. Instead, he allowed his military commanders to escalate the conflict. In April, Soviet troops, supported by bombers and helicopters, attacked a new compound of Islamic fighters along the mountain passes of Jaji, near the Pakistani border. The leader of those fighters, many of them Arab volunteers, was Osama Bin Laden.
However, Reagan—and those around him—can be blamed for ignoring the rise of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan and for failing to see Gorbachev's offer to withdraw as an opportunity to clamp the danger. Certainly, the danger was, or should have been, clear. Only a few years had passed since the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power in Iran—the shah toppled, the U.S. Embassy employees held hostage, the country turned over to the mullahs, the region suddenly destabilized. Reagan beat Jimmy Carter so decisively in the 1980 election in part because of the hostage crisis.
Gorbachev had accepted that Afghanistan would become an Islamic country. But he assumed that Reagan, of all people, would have an interest in keeping it from becoming militantly, hostilely, Islamist.
After the last Soviet troops departed, Afghanistan fell off the American radar screen. Over the next few years, Shevardnadze's worst nightmares came true. The Taliban rose to power and in 1996 gave refuge to the—by then—much-hunted Bin Laden.
Ten years earlier, had Reagan taken Gorbachev's deal, Afghanistan probably still wouldn't have emerged as the "friendly, neutral country" of Gorby's dreams. Yet it might have been a neutral enough country to preclude a Taliban takeover. And if the Russian-Afghan war had ended earlier—if Reagan had embraced Gorbachev on the withdrawal, as he did that same autumn on the massive cutback of nuclear weapons—Osama Bin Laden today might not even be a footnote in history.
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