pong
And you can be sure that Hugo Chavez is learning from the Cubans and is implementing this stuff in Venezuela.
Drive by Bump
Cuba did the same sending their athletes, trainers, coaches all over South America to develop athletes and promote communism. They did the same in the field of medicine sending their medical people all over the Global South.
These programs were unbelievably successful in third world countries. And, that is where much of the anti-Americanism is still found.
been there - know that
Yeah, but at least they never forced prisoners to wear panties on their heads. /s
Interesting read indeed.
What the liberal today as in the past attempts to do is to “compartmentalize” all the events. Your article makes the point of the links in these battles. Coincidence that some of the componenets on SA2 and 3 missiles used in Vietnam came from the DDR? The goal is to look at the war in Korea, Vietnam, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War stand off with the spy and terrorist actions in Europe, Grenada....... all as separate incidents with their own cause by those who oppose intervention. In reality they were all connected and part of a global struggle between the Communist block and the Western free world.
Here’s another interesting factoid. Some of the engineers in Grenada were East German, most of the construction workers were Cuban, and much of the project was financed through backdoors from the Soviet Union funneled through Nicaragua which was lead by a Soviet backed Sandinista regime. Yet when we invaded Grenada, freed hostages, and stopped the plan to build a gargantuan runway (large enough for Soviet strategic bombers) many were up in arms, and boy did the conspiracy theories fly.
Today you have the same thing happening. Those who oppose the war in Iraq and growingly even Afghanistan, who think we should not take action on Iran, are de facto required to separate or compartmentalize all these issues. They have to disconnect Hezbollah from Iran, $20,000 rewards for suicide bombers and Saddam, the Taliban and 911. Suddenly the problems in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan etc. are all separate issues with no connection to one another at the macro level. You have to disconnect these things in order to live in the happy go lucky world of no radical Islamic threat. People who oppose the intervention in Iraq are more or less forced to take this absurd position since they realize that otherwise their basic anti-war or intervention premise is logically flawed.
Inherently, large ideological struggles like this are trans-national and long terms (often multi-generational). The conflict usually takes on many faces, in different places, and even morphs over the years. It is often fought through proxies, and third party fringe groups. The battle is inherently more non-conventional and is fought on many planes simultaneously (Information Operations, intelligence battles, subversive political ploys etc). Think about the battle against Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines in the last years. Is this part of the much greater struggle between the free West and a radical Islamic world view? You bet; as much as it was when the Soviets and especially the former Tito Yugoslavia subversively attempted to throw Greece onto the side of the East block in the late 40s. Was the Greek civil war in the late 40s part of the Cold War? You bet! It was going on concurrently as we were airlifting supplies into a blockaded Berlin, and those fueling the communists in Greece sat on the other side of the wall. Is it the way the anti-war pundit then explained it? Of course not. Even then there were voices against our intervention in Greece although all supported the Berlin Airlift. Some will talk for days and days in circular arguments and plea to emotions, but it all boils down to that they can not accept the greater picture of the global conflict for whatever reason. May it be the Cold War or today the war against radical Islam; they are very similar in that both are inherently battles between two opposing world views and ways to organize society.
What you end up with are ridiculous arguments. In Vietnam some tried to argue that our intervention was for the vast tin found there and warm water ports. As soon as we landed on the beaches of Somalia it was said that large untapped oil reserves lie buried there. When we invaded Panama they said it was to hold onto the Canal….. Any different when we went into Grenada? The real motive for intervention has to be attacked if your one of those who thinks we should not be interventionist. Do we see this today? Those who find themselves against the war, may they be pacifists, some German that wants to uphold his self image because his state is a near do nothing, or a plethora of other reasons, they are in reality attacking the intervention because they are self rationalizing, and a key component of this argument is near always the separation of events and between cause and effect. However, any rational person with an objective mind, who has any knowledge of events quickly sees the connections, and just like the links between the Stazi and Cuba, there are links between what happened in the 2002 Bali bombing and 911. There are links between London and Madrid. There are links between Hezbollah and Iran. There are links between Pan Am 103 and Libya, just like the La Belle Disko and Libya………. In the Cold War there were many that were denying the ideological struggle. Many said that if we just lay down our arms we’d be left alone. Some sympathized with their enemy (You saw this more in Europe). All the same attempts at denial, attacking the motives, the pretending that these events all occur in a vacuum are made today. Today’s struggle being less well defined and harder to put ones arm around; less overt (No Khrushchev screaming “We will burry you” referring to the West and beating his shoe on the table); more asymmetric, and less consistent, is much more difficult to explain. In the Cold War we faced an ideological threat, and its face was very much the same from Castro (declared Communist), to Honneker (declared Communist) to Khrushchev (Head Communist) to Moa (Asian Communist), Poll Pot (Freak- Asian Communist), Ho chi min (Confuciust Communist)…… Today you’re looking at a common thread and ideology but no Warsaw Pact, no formal organizations (other than AQ) and those who want to see the picture as fuzzy have a much easier time.