There is also irony in that Afghanistan, and the women in particular, had greater freedom under the Soviets than under the Taliban.
Of course, I am certainly NOT an appologist for the Soviets. No freaking way.
Of course it was. The Soviets were the enemy. They were engaged in expansionism. We opposed them.
As evil as the Taliban was, it’s ridiculous to say that it was ‘far more evil’ than the Soviets - especially Soviet behaviour in Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion resulted in 4 MILLION refugees - the worst refugee crisis in the world at the time. Over 2 million Afghans were killed. Concentration camps were established and dissidents, intellectuals, and other troublemakers were rounded up and put into them. Over 30,000 people died in one camp alone.
The Soviets used terror tactics to stop the Mujahadeen, going after their families and home villages. One village was razed to the ground and 600 women and children killed by the Soviets when they discovered that men from the village were fighting against them. Another common terror tactic the Soviets used was to boobytrap toys and leave them lying around for children to pick up, at which point they were detonate and maim or kill the child.
This was an evil worth fighting. Arming the mujahadeen was a sensible policy, and it worked against the Soviet union well - before the U.S. started heavily supporting the opposition, the Soviets were winning the war. After the U.S. got involved, the tide began to turn. It was a great achievement.
What a completely ridiculous notion. Do you have any evidence that Reagan’s support for the Mujahadeen was the cause of Bin Laden’s rage? Or that Bin Laden wouldn’t have started his organization had Reagan not supported the Mujahadeen?
Bin Laden did not get his money from the United States - he comes from a very wealthy family, and is self-financed. His hatred of the U.S. had NOTHING to do with U.S. support in Afghanistan - his hatred came in spite of it.
Reagan deserves not a single iota of blame for 9/11.
Reagan deserves a lot of criticism for his support of many evil regimes during his presidency, including the Taliban, OBL, Saddam Hussein and I won’t even go into that whole Nicauagra thing.
And the Soviet Union of the eighties was nowhere near as brutal as the Taliban. Do you remember Russian women wearing burkhas?
Its treatment of its own citizens may not have been as brutal, but the Soviet Union’s repression in Afghanistan was terrible. The Soviet military has no finesse. It’s way of putting down rebellion is to simply smash everything. Torture was commonplace. Relatives of resistance fighters were executed in public squares as a threat to others who might resist. Entire villages were flattened.
You know how people are criticizing the U.S. for not getting the power on in Baghdad quickly enough? Occupying power’s responsibility, and all that. Well, the Soviet Union made no attempt to ease any of the humanitarian suffering and economic disruption it caused. As a result, the infant mortality rate was as high as 87% due to disease and malnutrition.
Hard to imagine anything being more brutal than that.
That doesn’t excuse propping up OBL and the Taliban. Those were not the only options that Reagan/Bush had.
What Sam Stone says is true, but it ALSO doesn’t excuse some of the more questionable things the US is doing in Iraq now. Encouraging/ignoring looting and so on – I’d say misdeed numero uno is securing the oil fields and ministry of oil and saying 'let ‘em tear down everthing else’ – may be relatively less bad, but if it was your town that wouldn’t provide a lot of comfort.
Not to mention selling weapons to terrorists to free hostages and then using the money to fund other terrorists.
But we won’t go into that, will we, Sam?
Not relevant. The terrorists were in Iran and Nicaragua, respectively. So wouldn’t that be a case of the U.S. opposing Saddam back then, given that Iran was an enemy?
Well, Iran was funding some terrorists–including the groups that were kidnapping U.S. citizens. On the other hand, the Nicarauguan terrorists were the U.S.-supported Somozan National Guard.
Meanwhile, since Iran was “bad” (even though we were dealing with them), we were providing Iraq support in various ways for Hussein to continue his war of aggression against Iran. Basically we were promoting a war for other countries (neither of which was a threat to the U.S.) to kill each other. (Which just might have some bearing on why folks in the region don’t seem to trust the U.S.)
The terrorists in Nicaragua? Could you be a bit more precise, Sam? About these “terrorists”. One could gather the impression you mean the Sandanistas and thier opposition to the Somoza regime. Were I to list the crime attributable to the Somoza regime, the blood would pool at the bottom of your monitor and drip onto the keyboard. A regime, I hasten to point out, enjoyed the unstinting support and fulsome praise of Ronald Reagan, the human sock puppet. Of course they were bloody plutocrats and savage tyrants, but they were anti-Communist plutocrats and tyrants.
How very entertaining! The record shows that the Sandanista’s faithfully implemented thier promise of free elections in Nicaragua, and when that election went against them, when a center-right conservative slate was elected, they handed over the reigns of governance to the duly elected.
Are these the “terrorists” of which you speak, Sam?
Reagan supported the Taliban? Jesus, this is just sheer historical revisionism. That argument has a critical flaw: the Taliban didn’t exist when Reagan was president.
As to the USSR not being as brutal as the Taliban? That’s utter nonsense. The USSR killed more than a million Afghans, nearly 90% civilians. The Taliban didn’t kill nearly as many. Both were repressive and murderous, but the atrocities of the Soviets far outweigh those under Omar and cohorts.
As to the hypothesis Skid Row adheres to, I quote Sovietologist Robert Conquest:
“Details may be disputed, but the fallacy in question has on the whole only been accepted in Western circles [belief that the USSR’s fall wasn’t aided significantly by the West], while rejected in Russia by those who had been at the center of Soviet policy. This was made clear on a numer of occasions- one of the most striking being the contribution of former Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh and the almost equally influential Anatoly Chernayev at a conference on the Cold War held at Princeton in 1993, both of whom stated flatly that President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative played a major role in convincing the Soviet leadership that the USSR could not compete economically or technologically.”
This burden upon the Soviets naturally caused a major strain which aided in the collapse of the empire.
I find elucidator’s implied apologetics for the Sandinistas errant. The infamous Contras were meritable of the label “terrorist,” of that it is certain. However, the Sandinista government wasn’t some benevolent entity that graciously, upon the virtues of altruism, declared free elections in 1990. Converseley, they only did so after strong pressure from the international community. During their reign, however, they held about 20,000 prisoners of conscience, and carried out a tragic policy of ethnic cleansing against the Miskito, Sumo and Rama Indians. As PJ O’Rourke noted, Sandanista Nicaragua was much akin to the dreary facets of East Germany.
Bah, I neglected to reference this in my previous post. Why do you contend that this is laughable? Communism is a horribly outdated and failure prone philosophy. Why has every espoused communist nation been that of murderous repression, all across the globe? The USSR, the PRC, Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, Cuba, the list is imposing. The USSR was a large scale version of various other communist regimes the world over, utilizing labor camps and engineered famines in order to keep the dissenting populace in line. Involved in numerous fatal foreign adventures (Hungary, Afghanistan), it has come to epitomize the expansionist policy of communism.
Historical revisionism is always disgusting, but even more so when that revisionism tries (pathetically) to defend a Communist regime. The Sandistas were murderous Cuban-supported communists; Don’t try to paint them as some sort of peaceful Democracy club.
It is mind-boggling (but not really suprising) that so many here are bending over backwards to defend communists. communism, as witnessed in the real world, is not some cute ‘power to the people’ form of government that your professors told you about. It is at least as evil as ‘Fascism’ ever was, if not more so.
Fighting against global communism may not have been the prettiest fight. It called for some unsavory, but justifiable, tactics. But it the end, it was (and is) worth it.
elucidator:
I was just responding to Guinistasia’s comment:
That was her characterization, not mine. Although if you want to characterize the contras as terrorists, I’ll accept that. They did a lot of unsavory things.
Sam
Ah. Misunderstood. Your explanation is entirely plausible.
Brutus
Point of fact, I have not been influenced by my crafty and cunning left-wing professors in about thirty five years.
Well, that is the party line, of course. You are welcome to it, if you take comfort in it. “Unsavory”. Yes, that is a fair, if wildly euphemistic, adjective.
If you believe in a monolithic global Communism, with all true-believing Marxists marching in lock-step in direct compliance with the orders from the Comintern, you are taking you conception of global politics from Marvel Comics.
Truth is, you can no more direct and control left-wing politics than you can herd cats. You can trust me on this, I know and love these people, and your enemies cannot drive you to exasperation and despair as quickly as your allies.
Well, some of the Soviet hierarchy did.
Funny you mention Iran, since Reagan’s dealings with Iran were a case of outright treason. Reagan continued to give arms to Iran even after the US knew for sure that Iran was responsible for the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy Marine barracks in Beirut which killed 258 Americans, 241 of whom were US military personel. It is treason, by the letter of the law, to give aid and comfort to an enemy of the US. I think truck bombing a US Embassy would put Iran in the “enemy” category (and remember an American Embassy is US soil). Is there any reason I shouldn’t regard selling arms to such a country as giving them aid and comfort?
If Clinton had done anything remotely as corrupt as Reagan’s Iran/Contra scam he would have been burned at the stake by conservatives.
Some in the 1920s. Fewer in the 1930s. None since.
In regards to communist expansionism, some of the hard liners were very stalwart in their beliefs. It is well known that NKVD agents were sent to Spain during the civil war, and the USSR after WWII worked to prop up as many puppet states as possible. They even funded the CPUSA. As Deputy Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov said in November 1945, “…the ideological conception prevailing here [the Kremlin] that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable.”
On July 20th, 1965 Leonid Brezhnev called for an “offensive” against the “imperialists” (capitalist nations) in an address to the Romanian Communist Party congress. This offensive, as was seen in, in a way, in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, is reiterated by the words of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1968 that, “…During any acute situation, however far away it appears from our country, the Soviet Union’s reaction is to be expected in all capitals of the world.” The Soviet’s were thus actively engaged in exporting their ideology.
Futhermore, this is exhibited in their intrusive actions around the world, including but not limited to the attempted assassination of dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the aiding of various regimes from Cuba to Nicaragua to Vietnam to Angola, and numerous other exploits. Of course, it could be stated (with some accuracy) that these were merely responses to American influence expansion, but some of these acts were entirely acts of nearly unstoppable Soviet aggression.
Brutus:
Prove it.
And even so, that did NOT justify the support of the contras, who were Somoza supporters from back in the day. Who Reagan said were the moral equivalent to our Founding Fathers.
Funny, I didn’t know the Founding Fathers went around raping nuns and killing little kids.
:mad: