[elbucko]

The same holds true for the Berlin Wall. No one could have imagined that just two years after Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall" speech the Berlin Wall would fall followed by the breakup of the Soviet Union.

That's a factual understatement. I was stationed in the army in the late 60's in Germany in an artillery unit. I had been a "Youth for Goldwater" in high school. I knew the geo-political, "lay-of-the-land" in Europe at the time. I visited the Berlin Wall and "Checkpoint Charlie". I was a US soldier in NATO, on the East West Frontier, ready to take on the commie hordes of the Warsaw Pact. I knew I would die the first day of the the first week. If anyone in our arty battery would have said that I would witness the fall of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Warsaw pact and some of its members become members of NATO, within my own lifetime, I would have called the M.P.'s to haul him away as a Section 8!

Twenty years later the wall came down from within. I was speechless as I watched it all on TV, here in the US! It was a miracle in my own time!

Peace is, indeed, possible in the Middle East, if we have no more Clinton's after Bush.

[kabar]

I was assigned to the US Mission Berlin (1983-87) and was present for Reagan's speech at the Wall. No one (Statre, CIA, DIA, etc.) at the US Mission even in 1987 ever predicted what happened just two years later. It was unthinkable.

The State Department wanted Reagan to delete the Tear Down this Wall statement because it was too confrontational and might damage US-Soviet relations even more. So much for listening to the experts