Posted on 05/15/2007 8:04:25 PM PDT by Remember_Salamis
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. The Democrats helped deliver a defeat on Vietnam, where we lost 58,000 dead. They were rewarded with a one-term president - Jimmy Carter.
Note that when the Democrats voted for defeat in Vietnam, they had massive majorities in both Houses. These majorities sank like a rock later. The point is that not everything is about the war. If their socialist policies lead to a recession, the American voter will turf them sooner rather than later.
Will the Washington Post and MSNBC work?
Much much more at link Regan inherited this mess from Carter.
snip
During his tenure at the CIA, Casey played a large part in the shaping of Reagan’s foreign-policy, particularly its approach to Soviet expansionism. Casey oversaw the re-expansion of the Intelligence Community, in particular the CIA, to funding and human resource levels greater than those before resource cuts during the Carter Administration. During his tenure restrictions were lifted on the use of the CIA to directly, covertly influence the internal and foreign affairs of countries relevant to American policy.
This period of the Cold War saw an increase of the Agency’s anti-Soviet activities around the world. Casey was the principal architect of the arms-for-hostages deal that became known as the Iran-Contra affair. He also oversaw covert assistance to the mujahadeen resistance in Afghanistan by working closely with Akhtar Abdur Rahman (the Director General of ISI in Pakistan), the Solidarity movement in Poland, and a number of coups and attempted coups in South- and Central America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey
Anatomy of a Victory: CIA’s Covert Afghan War
By: Steve Coll, Washington Post, July 19, 1992
“In all, the United States funneled more than $ 2 billion in guns and money to the mujaheddin during the 1980s, according to U.S. officials. It was the largest covert action program since World War II.”
A specially equipped C-141 Starlifter transport carrying William Casey touched down at a military air base south of Islamabad in October 1984 for a secret visit by the CIA director to plan strategy for the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan border, where he watched mujaheddin rebels fire heavy weapons and learn to make bombs with CIA-supplied plastic explosives and detonators.
During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory — into the Soviet Union itself.
Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union’s predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials.
“We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union,” Casey said, according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the meeting.
Casey’s visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to Western officials.
How the Reagan administration decided to go for victory in the Afghan war between 1984 and 1988 has been shrouded in secrecy and clouded by the sharply divergent political agendas of those involved. But with the triumph of the mujaheddin rebels over Afghanistan’s leftist government in April and the demise of the Soviet Union, some intelligence officials involved have decided to reveal how the covert escalation was carried out.
The most prominent of these former intelligence officers is Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war between 1983 and 1987 and who last month published in Europe and Pakistan a detailed account of his role and that of the CIA, titled “The Bear Trap.”
This article and another to follow are based on extensive interviews with Yousaf as well as with more than a dozen senior Western officials who confirmed Yousaf’s disclosures and elaborated on them.
snip
The attacks later alarmed U.S. officials in Washington, who saw military raids on Soviet territory as “an incredible escalation,” according to Graham Fuller, then a senior U.S. intelligence official who counseled against any such raids. Fearing a large-scale Soviet response and the fallout of such attacks on U.S.-Soviet diplomacy, the Reagan administration blocked the transfer to Pakistan of detailed satellite photographs of military targets inside the Soviet Union, other U.S. officials said.
snip
An intelligence coup in 1984 and 1985 triggered the Reagan administration’s decision to escalate the covert progam in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. The United States received highly specific, sensitive information about Kremlin politics and new Soviet war plans in Afghanistan. Already under pressure from Congress and conservative activists to expand its support to the mujaheddin, the Reagan administration moved in response to this intelligence to open up its high-technology arsenal to aid the Afghan rebels.
Beginning in 1985, the CIA supplied mujaheddin rebels with extensive satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet targets on the Afghan battlefield, plans for military operations based on the satellite intelligence, intercepts of Soviet communications, secret communications networks for the rebels, delayed timing devices for tons of C-4 plastic explosives for urban sabotage and sophisticated guerrilla attacks, long-range sniper rifles, a targeting device for mortars that was linked to a U.S. Navy satellite, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, and other equipment.
The move to upgrade aid to the mujaheddin roughly coincided with the well-known decision in 1986 to provide the mujaheddin with sophisticated, U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Before the missiles arrived, however, those involved in the covert war wrestled with a wide-ranging and at times divisive debate over how far they should go in challenging the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Roots of the Rebellion In 1980, not long after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to prop up a sympathetic leftist government, President Jimmy Carter signed the first — and for many years the only — presidential “finding” on Afghanistan, the classified directive required by U.S. law to begin covert operations, according to several Western sources familiar with the Carter document.
The Carter finding sought to aid Afghan rebels in “harassment” of Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan through secret supplies of light weapons and other assistance. The finding did not talk of driving Soviet forces out of Afghanistan or defeating them militarily, goals few considered possible at the time, these sources said.
The cornerstone of the program was that the United States, through the CIA, would provide funds, some weapons and general supervision of support for the mujaheddin rebels, but day-to-day operations and direct contact with the mujaheddin would be left to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. The hands-off U.S. role contrasted with CIA operations in Nicaragua and Angola.
Saudi Arabia agreed to match U.S. financial contributions to the mujaheddin and distributed funds directly to ISI. China sold weapons to the CIA and donated a smaller number directly to Pakistan, but the extent of China’s role has been one of the secret war’s most closely guarded secrets.
In all, the United States funneled more than $ 2 billion in guns and money to the mujaheddin during the 1980s, according to U.S. officials. It was the largest covert action program since World War II.
In the first years after the Reagan administration inherited the Carter program, the covert Afghan war “tended to be handled out of Casey’s back pocket,” recalled Ronald Spiers, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, the base of the Afghan rebels. Mainly from China’s government, the CIA purchased assault rifles, grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light antiaircraft weapons, and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan. Most of the weapons dated to the Korean War or earlier. The amounts were significant — 10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983, according to Yousaf — but a fraction of what they would be in just a few years.
(c) ‘Washington Post’, 1992. Posted for Fair Use Only
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/wtc/oblnus091401.html
Osama bin Laden, Saudi-born millionaire turned Islamic terror chieftain, has been on the radar of the United States since the days when both he and the CIA were fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Now, he is public enemy number one. NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem has tracked bin Laden’s activities since the mid-1990s. Here are some questions and answers about bin Laden:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3907198/
Baloney.
Ron Paul is a nutjob. He blew any chances of being taken seriously last night.
Even if that were Bin Laddin’s SOLE motivation, which I doubt, that is not what is happening here.
We are engaged a war of cultures and of values.
On one hand we have open societies based on the freedom of the individual and pluralism which tolerates all relgious beliefs.
On the other hand we have Islam - an aggressive cult of death whose sole purpose is to impose its restrictive world views and theocratic government by force or pursuation on the rest of humanity - something it has done with great success in the past.
The availability of the internet and television, not to mention “student visas” have allowed these primitives a closer look into our society than they ever enjoyed in the past and they recognize the threat our life style and values pose for their society.
Again, Ron Paul is an idiot on foreign policy.
I rate your post as one of the best for its insight into the global village aspect of this culture war. Bravo to you!
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I worry about the really evil, evil CFR power elite behind Bush’s throne. Mr. Paul is taking an extreme personal risk putting himself into the crosshairs of those NWO international banker globalists who control this government and are currently on a fast track to establishing their fascist, Orwellian rule over the entire earth via the SPP, NAU, and beyond.
They are probably wondering right now if it’s such a good idea to allow a maverick, Liberty-loving Constitutionalist to be planting the seeds of unorthodox thought into the minds of the mentally enslaved population that they have spent so much time and money brainwashing into amenability to their agenda.
Barack Obama, although not the kind of immediate threat to them that Ron Paul is, would also be well advised to watch his back very carefully. It would be much preferrable to have a mature and cynical bitch like Hillary in the oval office, whose husband has already served them faithfully, than some idealistic youngster who, upon coming to a realization of who and what is really in control of this world’s destiny, might become sufficiently revolted and disgusted that he would start threatening to throw some wrenches into heir plans.
A little inconsistent, no?
Just because you say it's a culture war doesn't make it so.
“So we should restrict our own freedoms and liberties, which you say we are defending, in order to prevent the enemy from using them to destroy our freedom and liberties?”
I didn’t really say that, but in ANY war, we have to accept some kinds of restrictions on our activities which we would normally oppose. We did that in the Revolution, Civil War, WW1, and WW2. We didn’t in Viet Nam, which is one of the reasons we lost.
“Just because you say it’s a culture war doesn’t make it so.”
Its more people than humble me who have stated that and in very clear terms, and a good many of the speakers were our enemies themselves. Facts speak for themselves. Only the blind refuse to recognize them.
Dubya stays stubborn, and we're in Iraq with current troop levels through the election.
The GOP nominates a pro-war candidate like Rudy or McCain and loses to whichever democrat runs. If they panic and turn anti-war in the middle of the race, the dems will label them a flip-flopper.
House members will continue to support the war, and will lose a lot of seats.
Result: a massive Dem Majority with a Dem President. All that has been gained in the last 14 years, which isn't that much, is lost. Hello Socialized Medicine. Hello tax hikes. Hello federally-funded abortion.
Yes Larry, Mass Murderers DO have reasons. But that doesn’t say that their acts are justified. Ron Paul did not say they were justified either.
“Remember Salamis” is an interesting tagline.
If the Athenians were not willing to leave their city for Aegina, and not willing to accept a Spartan “Admiral”, the Persians very likely would have won the Persian War.
So you see, we are not in a unique situation here.
I don't really care if they topple the Saudi Regime, but I doubt they have the capability to do so. If they were successful against the Saudi Regime in any way, it would be to wrest the Holy Lands in Western Saudi (Mecca, Medina, and the surrounding areas) away from the House of Saud. They can play Caliphate in the sandbox of Western Saudi Arabia.
I'm tired of the doomsday scenarios that aren't even remotely plausible.
If my Brother was killed, I would take out retribution on their brother and leave it at that; that is retribution. I DO NOT have the right to kill their brother in addition; that would be an act of aggression. Bringing the analogy back to 9/11, we slapped around the man who killed our brother, left him bleeding, and started beating the crap out of his second cousin.
But that is WHY they attacked us; They are wrong, but that is why they did it.
How is that deterrent working out for Russia?
Very true, 9/11 is way too charged and candidates (ie Giuliani) will jump on that in a heartbeat... But if you listen to what Paul said and the way he said it, he cares about this country and firmly believes our policies are weakening us instead of strengthening us.
I’m no supporter of globalism.
I recognize that this President, along with most of his predecessors, have sold out to internationalist corporate interests which are no friends of America. Their ultimate bottom line is the profit margin, not patriotism. But I have to agree with you that the current incumbent has thus far exceeded his predecessors to the degree he has been willing to accommodate these interests.
His failure to enforce our border laws, his appointment of an illegal alien advocate as his AG, his collusion with the Mexican Government to violate our borders and to persecute government officials - at least 5, some of whom are Hispanic-American citizens - for upholding the laws he is flouting, is unprecedented.
George Bush II has assured us that no member of his family will ever succeed him. He has been responsible in part for the loss of Congress to the Democrats and the shadow of his incompetency looms over the candidates running for the Republican nomination which is why they frequently invoked Ronald Reagan - the greatest President of the 2oth Century, instead of Bush II.
The government’s failure to stop the gradual evaporation of our industrial base to companies overseas threatens American prosperity, American jobs, the American dream and way of life, and most importantly, American Security.
As Duncan Hunter so aptly put it last night, the Arsenal of Democracy which defeated NAZI Germany and Imperial Japan no longer exists thanks to this hemorrhaging, a process which, again, began in prior administrations but has been accelerated in this one.
History will judge Bush II as harshly as it will judge Bill Clinton, Bush I, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson.
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