but we ultimately prevailed--and it wasn't because we were, to borrow your phrase, more beautiful.
...and then promptly began behaving worse than the former Soviet overlords would have dreamed about. Won't let us run our pipeline through your country to the Adriatic? We'll bomb you. Vote for the wrong leaders (Serbia, Slovakia, Belarus, Albania, etc)? We'll overthrow them. Do what we say, or else. I wonder about the Cold War. Was it really fought for freedom? Or for certain Western business interests (most of which happened to coincide with Soviet interests as well).
I agree. Before 1991 the USSR was the imperialist power. Since 1991 I have seen my country become a grotesque empire.
"Won't let us run our pipeline through your country to the Adriatic? We'll bomb you. Vote for the wrong leaders (Serbia, Slovakia, Belarus, Albania, etc)? We'll overthrow them. Do what we say, or else. I wonder about the Cold War. Was it really fought for freedom? Or for certain Western business interests (most of which happened to coincide with Soviet interests as well)."
I don't think it's about pipelines. That doesn't seem important enough to me. It can only be an attempt to distract Muslim fanatics from Israel. I think it's an attempt to make Muslims think that Slavs, and not Israel, is the enemy. It's an attempt to make Muslims think the US is their friend. I think it's all an attempt to protect Israel by diverting the energies of the Muslims into fighting Christian Slavs.
I'll fall back to one of the wisest statements I've seen on FR in a long while: "Things seldom happen for one reason." You said it a few posts back.
Wars are seldom fought for one reason. Many of us were in the Cold War for freedom, for God, for Western Civilization, for simple human decency. Others were in it for money, or worse. The trouble is, once the War was over, the mercenary crowd managed to do two incredible things: 1) it gained a sort of superficial legitimacy, and 2) it got a hell of a lot more powerful.
I never completely figured out how this happened. I've always blamed it on a deft repositioning by the Left toward the so-called "Third Way." The new Third Way Left managed to shed all of its baggage from the Cold War and immediately begin implementing a program of rapid globalization and economic materialism. They did as the inheritors of the "peace dividend" and the new leaders of the victorious "West."
It's all so complicated; as I said, I haven't begun to figure it out. But I'm pretty sure these people weren't really in control of the West throughout the Cold War.
That is not to say that bin Laden is not evil and dangerous and should definitely be done away with, but what makes him so dangerous is that what he had to say in his screed to the world last night was that it held a kernal of truth in it; just like Hitler's rants when he was running for office in Germany. He should definitely take the old "dirt nap," but after this is all over more Americans need to wake up to these powerful cabals on Wall Street and over at CFR, and throw their stalking horses in Washington out of office in one fell swoop. If this isn't done, really bad unrest is coming to America boys and girls.