Posted on 02/19/2003 12:07:28 PM PST by mrustow
Actually, it's a very intelligent article, but you can't understand it, if you're a doo-doo head.
A man once said that a person can accomplish a lot, if he doesn't care who gets the credit. Unfortunately, there are some people who love a certain man a whole lot. They think the man is God, and they say that he's responsible for everything that's good. And they get real, real mad at anyone who says he isn't God, and isn't responsible for everything good.
Let's not forget that under Jimmy Carter, the Soviets intensified their forces while America suffered demilitarization and demoralization. Under Carter, US military forces were inferior to the Soviets.
No, they tend to get real, real mad when RR's
record-of-accomplishments is selectively revised & misappropriated.
mrustow...See Victoria's post 'n catch a clue.
...and I'd be more than a little interested as to why the opinions of former upper-echelon Soviets have no credence.
Arab advisers now are reinforcing a sizable contingent of Cubans in efforts to reorganize Venezuela's security services, assimilate its industries based on totalitarian models and repress a popular opposition movement. "What happens in Venezuela may affect how you fight a war in Iraq," Gen. James Hill of U.S. Southern Command is reported recently to have told his colleague at U.S. Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks.
"Chavez is planning to coordinate an anti-American strategy with terrorist states," says Venezuela's former ambassador to Libya, Julio Cesar Pineda, who reveals correspondence between the Venezuelan president and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi about the need to "solidify" ties between liberation movements in the Middle East and Latin America and use oil as an economic weapon.
Exhorting his countrymen to return to their "Arab roots," Chavez has paid state visits to Libya, Iraq and Iran and signed a series of mutual-cooperation treaties with the rogue governments whose operatives now are flooding into Venezuela. There they can blend into an ethnic Arab community estimated at half-a-million.
Last Jan. 10, 18 Libyan technicians flying in from Tripoli via Frankfurt, Germany, were received at the Caracas airport by Ali Ahmed, head of Libya's "Commission" in Venezuela. He was accompanied by the parliamentary whip of the ruling Venezuelan Revolutionary Movement (MVR), Cilia Flores. Nicolas Maduro and Juan Baruto, two other bosses of the MVR party militias (the Circulos Bolivarianos) who had paid an extended visit to Tripoli in 2000, also were on hand to smooth the way for the Libyans coming off Lufthansa Flight 534.
The Libyan agents were identified as: Alsudik Alghariy, Elmabruk Najjar, Koaled Adun, Zeguera Adel, Sherif Nagib, Abubaker Benelfgh, Nabiel Bentahir, Abdulfat Enbia, Waldi Majrab, Amhamed Elkum, Abdulgha Nashnush, Mohamed Romia, Abdurao Shwich, Abdulnass Elghanud, Ezzedin Barhmi, Abdulssa Seleni, Hassan Gwile and Mhemmed Besha.
The high level of security provided for the Libyans' arrival was intended to avoid the havoc of previous days when the entry of Iraqi and Iranian groups touched off a riot. As word of the landing of 20 Iranians had spread through Simón Bolívar International Airport on Jan. 8, crowds of infuriated travelers banged counters and cigarette urns and chanted "Get out! Get out!" to protest what many Venezuelans perceive as foreign interference in their country's affairs.
…………. Meanwhile, Iraqi VIPs, moving under the protection of Chavez's secret police -- the Department of Intelligence Security and Prevention (DISIP) -- came to the attention of Venezuela's regular military when government agents tried to use air-force planes to fly five of Saddam Hussein's agents into the interior of the country. Military pilots requested special clearances before allowing the Iraqis onto the C-130s.
Military sources also report that the recently arrived group of Libyans is billeted at the Macuto Sheraton Hotel in La Guaira, which they share with Cuban commandos who have been conducting strike-breaking operations around the nation's oil ports. Local units of the National Guard, the branch of the Venezuelan armed forces responsible for internal security, were reported to be refusing government orders to repress strikers.
According to Capt. Jose Ballabes of the merchant-marine union, the Cubans improvised floating concentration camps on board oil tankers, threatening officers and crews to get them to move the paralyzed vessels. When the Venezuelans still resisted, "such methods as sleep deprivation, often used against political dissidents in Cuba, are being systematically employed against our people," says Ballabes.
Sources in Venezuela's merchant navy name two of the Cuban agents on the tankers as Arturo Escobar and Carlos Valdez, who were presented as "presidential advisers" operating with DISIP. Venezuela's internal-security organization now is reported to be controlled by a command cell of undercover officers from Fidel Castro's military-intelligence service. Venezuelan sources say the Cuban operatives also run a computerized war room inside Chavez's presidential palace, Miraflores. It is in this war room that the repressive policies now afflicting the country have been planned, according to serving officers in the Venezuelan army, navy and national guard consulted by Insight.
The Libyans, like the Cubans, are specialists in military intelligence and security, but are described as computer specialists brought in to operate and reprogram crashed systems at the oil refineries, according to industry sources.
"The West must expect deepening relations between Venezuela and Islamic states," says professor Elie Habalian, a specialist in petroleum economics and a consultant to PDVSA President Ali Rodriguez Araque, who is identified by Venezuelan military sources as a one-time communist guerrilla chief. Aided by Cuban intelligence and Islamic workers, the government has managed to get oil production back up to 34 percent, a level sufficient to supply basic domestic needs. "It's a war between two models," continues Habalian, "one seeking total control over oil policy and the liberal international policy represented by PDVSA's previous management" effectively eliminated by the government, which has ordered the mass dismissal of 7,000 oil-company employees.
Interfacing of Venezuela's oil industry with the radical state systems also facilitates plans for a possible oil embargo against the United States in the event the military assault on Iraq is prolonged. While international oil experts consider such a scenario unlikely due to Venezuela's desperate need for export earnings, Venezuelan opposition leaders fear that Chavez could take advantage of a conflagration in the gulf to consolidate his dictatorship with the support of Cuban and Arab agents already in place.
"Chavez has violated the constitution on 34 counts and is moving to nationalize banking," says a leading member of Venezuela's business community. "He has packed the high courts with his judges, neutralized the army and turned the national assembly into a rubber-stamp parliament. All that's left to do is shut down the independent media and decapitate the opposition." According to this source, Chavez is most likely to move when world attention is fixed on Iraq.
……….. Undercover police officers report that the group has ties to a Hezbollah financial network operating from the Caribbean island of Margarita under Mohammed al Din, an important Chavez backer and a close friend of hard-line MVR deputy Adel el Zabayar Samara, a key link between Islam and Latin America's radical left.
The Caracas cell is involved in recruiting Venezuelan Arabs for terrorist indoctrination and military training at isolated camps in the country's interior and on islands off the coast, according to intelligence officers who claim that members of al-Qaeda are hiding out in Margarita. They say these members include Diab Fattah, who was deported from the United States for his possible connections with the Sept. 11 hijackers. Four Venezuelan officers investigating terrorist activities on the resort island were killed in 2001 when Chavez moved to dissolve DISIP Section 11, which had targeted radical Arabs. ***
You can't have it both ways, and I don't know how anyone can take this seriously. Either he was the principle figure in ending the cold war, and we can say ending it was bad, or he wasn't and then the rest of the nostalgia was unrelated to him. You can't have both.
You're the sophist, Peep. You have deliberately misrepresented the article, which said that IF Reagan was responsible for winning the Cold War (as per the conventional wisdom which you believe in), then he is also responsible for the disorder that followed. However, the writer concluded that Reagan was responsible for neither, because the conventional wisdom was wrong.
As for trying to have it both ways, Peep, you're projecting. You want Reagan to get all the credit for ending the Cold War, but without getting any of the responsibility for the disorder that followed. You've turned a man into a God.
The article doesn't seek to discredit the man at all, except in the eyes of his idolators. Rather, it is a sober-minded look at recent history which would probably be just as despised by lefties, as it apparently is by Reagan-worshipers.
"If the conventional wisdom in the U.S. is correct, and Ronald Reagan's arms buildup caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Reagan must get both the credit and the blame for today's world order, or lack thereof. With all due respect, however, I don't think he deserves either. Reagan cared deeply about the millions oppressed by Soviet totalitarianism, but he did not cause The Wall to come down."
No, they tend to get real, real mad when RR's record-of-accomplishments is selectively revised & misappropriated.
Well, since I think the author was fair, we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
mrustow...See Victoria's post 'n catch a clue.
While I have the greatest respect for Victoria, that does not mean that we always agree.
...and I'd be more than a little interested as to why the opinions of former upper-echelon Soviets have no credence.
...and I'd be more than a little interested as to why the opinions of one of America's leading journalists, who spent years in Europe, have no credence.
Get over it.
You proved nothing. All you did was scream invective at me that was by turns ungrammatical, logically incoherent, and dishonest. And unless you're a communist or carry a tapeworm inside of you, I suggest you drop the plural personal pronoun.
What Chavez is pulling, with the help of the Arabs and especially, the Cubans, sounds like the old Soviet playbook for putting down popular rebellions, which they perfected in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Since the Cubans were constantly being trained and re-trained by the Soviets, they would have learned the same tactics: using outside communist (Soviet in the old days, now Cuban) military and intelligence units that had been flown in for just that purpose, to disarm local, anti-communist police and military, and to destroy or capture lines of communication and media used by the opposition.
In Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets "integrated" Soviet military and intelligence officers into garrisons. When the Czech troops decided to fight back, the Soviet officers blocked the weapons rooms, their weapons drawn.
I would expect to hear of massive arrests and executions of high-level, anti-communist, Venezuelan military officers.
Go away.
More projection, from someone desperate for attention. I'm the one who posted article, remember. You are the character who joined the thread by claiming that I was going nuts with attacks on critics, when as it turned out, you were just warming up with your craziness. And you even add a stupid tag, where you insist that anyone who doesn't worship Ronald Reagan is a lefty. But I'm the pathetic one?
And why would I "go away" from a thread I posted? Or do you mean, "go away" from FR, Mr. 2-6-2003? Who died, and made you boss, Chump? And are you now going to say that you've really been a FReeper for years, but you just re-registered under your 20th different username? Nobody's forcing you to waste bandwidth. This is, after all, a FREE Republic.
Your neurotic, obsessive behavior has been of value, in spite of yourself. For you have drawn attention to an important article, even as you have desired that no one read it!
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