Saddam was a national socialist whom we supplied against the Iranian mullahs in a Machiavellian manuever we may well come to regret. Nader is leaving out a good deal of information here. Since he doesn't feel that opposing the Soviet Union was a worthy cause, he can't admit that we might have had good reasons to make the mistakes we made. I don't remember reading about him offering us any solutions for fighting communism. He's always been critical of the west without offering much in the way of workable solutions.
...Our corporate pornography and anything-goes values are profoundly offensive to them.
Here we see Nader's true love for communism emerge: corporations are his worst enemy. Capitalism is an impossible system that can't be trusted to raise the standard of living for people who live inside its system.
The left often discounts how serious the war with communism was. Of course that's due in part to their natural unwillingness to face difficulty. It also comes from their own love for utopian, statist ideologies. Marxism could have worked if we hadn't opposed Stalin and Mao so effectively, they say. And besides, the wars we've fought and dictators we've supported were nothing compared to bureaucratic mismanagement -- purely coincidental -- in communist countries.
Battles like Hamburger Hill are upheld as the poster moments for senseless acts of resistance to communism's "ineptitude."
And yet one battle at a time, one resistance at a time, one soldier's death at a time, one criticism, one jailing of an innocent in the Soviet Gulags, one torture of a resistance fighter at a time, communism began to collapse. Where was Nader then?
History will look far more kindly at the brave American troops who fell on Hamburger Hill than any pro-communist, Arabist activist like Ralph Nader.
