As Georgia's President Leaves, What Is Left Of the West's Victory In the Cold War

Forbes ^

[cunning_fish]

Why does it matter to the rest of us what happens in Georgia and environs? Answer: if the West cannot help an aspiring ally with dreams of joining Nato and the EU, cannot even protect it from Russian hegemony, what are we doing meddling in the Middle East or anywhere else? And if we can’t help Georgia, then what is left of the West’s victory in the Cold War?

I reported on the national elections in Tbilisi, Georgia, last October. On one occasion, I was shown a text from a politician of the party that won the election to a politician of the ruling party that lost (that of President Saakashvili). The text was nothing more nor less than a threat: the receiver should dump his affiliation to the President now, before the election, or face prosecution after. That entire campaign reeked of abuses and intimidation, above all by the opposition, but the world media only had eyes for the eccentricities of the billionaire challenger who owned zebras. The two sides spat poison at each other and it was a nice question as to who would win the besmirching match because whoever did would also clinch the outcome. In the end, the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili’s side succeeded in depicting the country under Saakashvili as a fearful prison-like state by releasing videos of scary abuses in the prison system, even though evidence showed that a jailed mafiotic hater of the President had paid for the videos. I chronicled much of the chicanery in my Newsweek International cover story of the time.

I bring all this up because the Presidential term of Saakashvili ended a few days ago.

[ZULU]

Blame Bush. More particularly, blame Bush I. After the “Evil Empire” was brought to destruction by Reagan, the Pope and Walesa, Uncle Sam should have been right there, offering assistance, aid and political and economic treaties with the former soviet states AND Russia. We could have HAD them as allies against the degenerate western Europeans and Red CHinese.

But no, the Bushes demonstrated time again, that just like Clinton and Obama, there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between a RINO and Leftist Democrat.

The BUSHES betrayed the Reagan Revolution and Clinton and Obama just delivered the coup de grace.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks cunning_fish.

Here's the passage at issue:

In the 1980s, the war caucus in Congress armed bin Laden and the mujaheddin in their fight with the Soviet Union. In fact, it was the official position of the State Department to support radical jihad against the Soviets. We all know how well that worked out.

Let's leave aside for now the insulting, utterly asinine, sickening, inexcusable use of the phrase "war caucus" to describe those (including Reagan!) who supported the mujaheddin against the Soviets. That word choice alone is almost entirely disqualifying for its purveyor to ever be president.

Instead, let's just look at a little history here -- because the ignorance evident in this paragraph is truly astonishing. One would be hard pressed to find even a single historian, whether right, left, or center, who would argue anything other than that the Soviet failure in Afghanistan was not just a huge factor, but probably an essential one, in the Soviets' ultimate loss of the Cold War. [Rand Paul’s Really Ignorant Paragraph | 7 Feb 2013]

[mrsmith]

We managed to wrest communism from them and bring it home...