No wondering Newsweek is dying a slow death...
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/the-case-for-sitting-on-our-hands.html
Hate to get political for a second but I just find it hard to believe something as scatterbrained as this piece can see publication. Talk about randomly assigning cause and effect to a variety of events and then retrospectively passing judgment. I ate eggs both days I had a car wreck. Eggs cause car wrecks AND cereal doesn't.
The crux of this piece is the author thinks that because there is domino effect of revolution in the Arab world we've wasted a trillion dollars and ten years of effort fighting in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Obviously, the implication is those regimes would have also toppled in similar fashion. Which ignores about a billion different nuances or obvious differences between the countries revolting right now and the ones we waged war in.
To further dig his hole of nonsense, he suggests that "waiting out" eastern Europe was the cause of the fall of the Iron Curtain. Facts, dispute this. Interesting piece on Reagan recently on tv, where it is quite clear the Soviet Union was toppled not by waiting for their economic rotten core to collapse on itself but by actually inducing that collapse.
They showed Teddy Kennedy mock Reagan's strategy for disarmament by questioning how building more weapons will one day reduce weapons. Actually, that was exactly what did it. Not only that Reagan had the foresight and inteligence to purposefully do it. Reagan's strategy was simple, by listening to the CIA he saw how close Russia was to ruin, and knew that when he ramped up the arms race they'd try to compete and then wouldn't be able to. As opposed to apeasement he got the Bear in a race it could not win. His coup de grace was SDI (also widely mocked). Which put the fear of God in Gorbachev and the Russians because they knew that was light years beyond their reach. Good poker player that he was, he never let on that it was also light years beyond ours.
That SDI played a pivitol role in the arms treaty that Reagan triumphantly negotiated, that did exactly what Kennedy suggested mockingly was impossible. A few short years later the USSR's total capitulation wasn't just at the negotiation table it was elsewhere. By the way, Reagan also visited Moscow and showed up where dissidents were gathered to lend support to the people, despite Soviet objections, and actively pressed them on human rights issues an example of another pressure point he attacked to induce change.
In his eight years, Reagan was busy doing other things, like bombing Libya and Khadafi into submission. Sure another terrorist group filled the void, but by not sitting on our hands we basically destroyed any chance of state sponsored terrorism. The totalitarian regime of Khadafi has been 'checked' by our omnious might ever since, so too, had any other would be dictator.
The great irony is Iraq tried the same sort of ruse or bluff on us with their "weapons of mass distruction" but we bulldozed right over those fears quite literally. It would be like the Russians striking first in case we were able to get SDI running. Course the difference between Reagan and the Iraqis was Reagan was engaaging in dialogue with the Russians and outmaneavuring them across a negotiating table while the Iraqis were kicking out International investigators.
The author randomly attributes disconnected events to one another but he ignores the easiest connection. I won't make the same mistake as the author and make a connection and cite it as fact, but here's one that makes a little more sense then the ones he tries to inaccurately make. It's far more plausible, that by toppling one regime we scared other regimes into scaling back to the point that their people could revolt, it is also possible, and plausible they were inspired by the new democracy filling the region.
Or not...
One thing the author glosses over is that all these new states or democracies could go afoul. Arguably Carter sat on his hands during a similar revolt in Iran--and look what happened there. The writer assumes a positive result when we have no idea what the result is going to be. In short, he supports his statement with inaccuracies, assumes a conclusion that has no where near been realized, and then seeks to use this a paint by numbers guide to current and previous foreign policy.
The logic in his piece is quite simply nonexistant, at best it is oversimplification to the point it lacks credibility at worst it's not fit to use as toliet paper.
Anyway, had Reagan sat back and
Hate to get political for a second but I just find it hard to believe something as scatterbrained as this piece can see publication. Talk about randomly assigning cause and effect to a variety of events and then retrospectively passing judgment. I ate eggs both days I had a car wreck. Eggs cause car wrecks AND cereal doesn't.
The crux of this piece is the author thinks that because there is domino effect of revolution in the Arab world we've wasted a trillion dollars and ten years of effort fighting in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Obviously, the implication is those regimes would have also toppled in similar fashion. Which ignores about a billion different nuances or obvious differences between the countries revolting right now and the ones we waged war in.
To further dig his hole of nonsense, he suggests that "waiting out" eastern Europe was the cause of the fall of the Iron Curtain. Facts, dispute this. Interesting piece on Reagan recently on tv, where it is quite clear the Soviet Union was toppled not by waiting for their economic rotten core to collapse on itself but by actually inducing that collapse.
They showed Teddy Kennedy mock Reagan's strategy for disarmament by questioning how building more weapons will one day reduce weapons. Actually, that was exactly what did it. Not only that Reagan had the foresight and inteligence to purposefully do it. Reagan's strategy was simple, by listening to the CIA he saw how close Russia was to ruin, and knew that when he ramped up the arms race they'd try to compete and then wouldn't be able to. As opposed to apeasement he got the Bear in a race it could not win. His coup de grace was SDI (also widely mocked). Which put the fear of God in Gorbachev and the Russians because they knew that was light years beyond their reach. Good poker player that he was, he never let on that it was also light years beyond ours.
That SDI played a pivitol role in the arms treaty that Reagan triumphantly negotiated, that did exactly what Kennedy suggested mockingly was impossible. A few short years later the USSR's total capitulation wasn't just at the negotiation table it was elsewhere. By the way, Reagan also visited Moscow and showed up where dissidents were gathered to lend support to the people, despite Soviet objections, and actively pressed them on human rights issues an example of another pressure point he attacked to induce change.
In his eight years, Reagan was busy doing other things, like bombing Libya and Khadafi into submission. Sure another terrorist group filled the void, but by not sitting on our hands we basically destroyed any chance of state sponsored terrorism. The totalitarian regime of Khadafi has been 'checked' by our omnious might ever since, so too, had any other would be dictator.
The great irony is Iraq tried the same sort of ruse or bluff on us with their "weapons of mass distruction" but we bulldozed right over those fears quite literally. It would be like the Russians striking first in case we were able to get SDI running. Course the difference between Reagan and the Iraqis was Reagan was engaaging in dialogue with the Russians and outmaneavuring them across a negotiating table while the Iraqis were kicking out International investigators.
The author randomly attributes disconnected events to one another but he ignores the easiest connection. I won't make the same mistake as the author and make a connection and cite it as fact, but here's one that makes a little more sense then the ones he tries to inaccurately make. It's far more plausible, that by toppling one regime we scared other regimes into scaling back to the point that their people could revolt, it is also possible, and plausible they were inspired by the new democracy filling the region.
Or not...
One thing the author glosses over is that all these new states or democracies could go afoul. Arguably Carter sat on his hands during a similar revolt in Iran--and look what happened there. The writer assumes a positive result when we have no idea what the result is going to be. In short, he supports his statement with inaccuracies, assumes a conclusion that has no where near been realized, and then seeks to use this a paint by numbers guide to current and previous foreign policy.
The logic in his piece is quite simply nonexistant, at best it is oversimplification to the point it lacks credibility at worst it's not fit to use as toliet paper.
Anyway, had Reagan sat back and
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