I've been talking to a liberal who doesn't believe that Reagan won the cold war. This person believes that the Soviet Union collapsed by itself and would have done so even without Reagan's military build-up.
I guess some people just have the liberal fog hard-set in their eyes, but I really would like to clear this person's vision.
I recently read a piece here about Guadal Canal in WWII which was interesting. The Guadal Canal was expected to be an easy, but minor, victory; it turned out to be a much more difficult, but much more major, victory since the Japanese spent an unexpectedly-large amount of resources defending it.
The Iraq war is more difficult than expected, but probably for basically the same reason: there are a lot of nasty people all over the world who want to foil our efforts there. If we surrender, the nasty people all over the world will be emboldened, but if we win they will be severely crippled.
The nasty people's strategy is intended to make us back down. If we do, they win. But if we don't, the fact that our enemies have adopted this strategy can be used to our enormous advantage. Tactically it may hurt, but in the long run it will be a major victory.
You're absolutely right. It is harder. But here's the point. The terrorists are coming in from outside Iraq, right perfectly positioned for us to take them out. We are perfectly positioned to fight them there.
The liberals and the media seem to forget, manpower, and finances (that they have to have to carry out their terrorism) are limited resources. It's limited for us too, but we can put a great deal more into it than they can. If they're spending it there, it will limit what the can spend elsewhere. I think Iraq is a good place to make a stand and take the fight to our enemy.
The Soviet Union was teetering on teh brink of collapse for 20 years before President Reagan delivered the coup de gras by terrifying Gorbechev with the spector of Star Wars. Without that and his other foreign policy moves, the Soviet Union would have CONTINUED on the brink of collapse to this day.
Your liberal aquaintance forgets that the Soviet public was tired of freezing in their rabbit-hutch-sized apartments while wondering when the middle of the night callers would come to take THEM away. President Reagan was loved and admired Soviet Union as the American cowboy fighting, old West-style, for the little guy. Gorbechev - well, he wasn't very well liked.
Someday, you might also tell him that the problems of socialism have NOT been ironed out by the "progressives". Waco proves that.
Good point about Iraq.
As with the liberal, funny how they either claim the Soviet Union collapsed by iteslef (for not being true Marxism). Or..that it failed because the evil Western Capitalists stacked the deck against them. "If we knew socialism, we'd be down on our knees begging for it". Sometimes these two contradictions come from the same useful idiot.
Good job conneting the dots between the Cold War and the war in Iraq. My tagline for quite a while was - "It's better to fight the WOT in the Iraqi "holy" city of Najaf, than in the American holy city of New York." Why can't people see that?