Once you've compromised on morals and principles, it's over.
Posted on 09/07/2013 10:13:51 PM PDT by jeltz25
With all the recent talk about the rebels in Syria being affiliated with AQ, I got to thinking about the "rebels" against the Russians back in the 80s.
Now, AQ didn't exist back then, but they were clearly the forerunners of AQ and many of them grew into AQ and other terrorist movements. If you look back many of the folks the CIA backed back then(working hand in hand with the Wahabbis in Saudi and the ISI in Pakistan) were not exactly the salt of the earth.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but just wondering how folks feel about that now. You could argue that beating the USSR was the bigger issue(although you could also say Iran is the bigger issue here).
The situations seem pretty similar to me in many respects.
It seems unfair to judge his actions in hindsight. A more appropriate question would be whether, given the information he had in the situation he faced, backing the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 80’s was a good decision.
Well, I always thought it was a mistake for Nixon to go to Red China. There is a side of me where I think Reagan did make a mistake in backing the Mujahideen too. I guess we go to remember, the world was different then and we had to act on the information we have and/or play our cards as best as we can. Still looking back, I do wonder if both were a mistake.
fair enough, i’d say he had a lot information back then, though.
we knew all about Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, what they were about. We knew the freedom fighters in Afghanistan weren’t exactly boy scouts. We knew about guys like Abdullah Azzam and Hekmatyar and the rest.
Back then the USSR was “the main enemy”. Reagan had a policy of supporting proxy wars to take them down. In Afghanistan, in Central America. In his view the end result of defeating the USSR was the main objective and if we had to get in bed with some folks, so be it. Just as in WW2 he had to throw in with the USSR against Germany.
I’m just saying I see some parallels here and I hope we learn from past mistakes.
Once you've compromised on morals and principles, it's over.
Communists were the bigger enemy so we sided with their enemy. Not too different than siding with Stalin against Hitler.
The US has always been supporting jihadist sunnis. Reagan Presidency was no exception.
No, and even if someone wants to paint a worse case view of it, which won’t be that bad, nothing can compare to the near end of life as we know it, in the 1980s.
By 1979 my personal take was that the mid 80s was the big deadline for the USSR, that was when they had to make their attack on the West, or lose a window that could cost them a decade or two to regain.
During my military service which I started again in 1983, to join in Reagan’s global war against the Soviet Union, my serving on the outer fringes of Military Intelligence led me to believe that I had been right in my 1979 assessment that Soviet power, and American weakness, would reach a sweet spot for the Soviets around 1984/85 it was a window where the Soviets had to either jump, or else Reagan’s build up would have time to take hold and fill the hole, costing the Soviets another decade or two.
Nobody anticipated Reagan actually taking them out during his decade.
Nobody was predicting the end of the Soviet Union, instead, they were seen as winning, expanding, and our media was groveling at their feet, even allowing them to influence and veto Hollywood projects.
The mujadideen were fighting the Soviets. It was a case of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Maybe we should have wiped out the opium poppies that helped fund them afterwards, but that was politically incorrect...
No. It was the right thing to do at the time and we had a clandestine army highly motivated to kill and oust the Soviets , who wanted to build a pipeline from Moscow to Tehran.
We couldn’t foresee the creation of AQ and Crapgahnistan becoming a safe haven.
Then again, safe haven was found for them in Pakistan.
They operate worldwide under the emotions of their cult.
They are all over Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.
It was the right thing to do.
That said, how likely was it the Russians could have crushed the muzzies on their own? True, they were not being PC in waging war on the basturds, but they were not having an easy go of it before we gave the muz Stingers.
A reading of contemporary Russian literature on their war would be interesting if it were not too stultifying.
President Reagan’s biggest blunder was letting the spending triple during his 8 years without vetoes.
Anytime that a Western nation backs islamists is a bad decision just as it was in Kosovo and what is happening right now.
The greatest blunder the West has committed is to allow muslim immigration.
Don’t forget that at the time, the Soviets were a expansionist superpower with thousands of nuclear weapons. (Yes, they were rotten at the core, but we didn’t know that.) It seems reasonable to believe that, assuming he had intel on bad they were, Reagan saw dealing with the Muj as the lesser of two evils.
Funny, how that echoes "Alas Babylon", though the dates were quite a bit off in the book, but the premise the same.
so couldn’t you argue that the right thing now is to take out the Iranians and Hezbollah in Syria?
not saying I’d agree.
I think you could also argue that the bigger mistake wasn’t so much in supporting them to begin with but in pretty much losing interest and picking up stakes in the late 80s and ignoring things until 9/11.
We should have done what the 1st king of Saudi Arabia did in 1925.
Him and the Saud family teamed up with this group of fighters to take control of the country, but the fighters still had issues and were causing trouble and threatening him. So he called this big pow-wow out in the desert where they’d all meet and settle things. Only when they all showed up he had his boys open up on them with truck mounted machine guns and gatling guns and wiped them all out. End of threat.
Well, yeah, but he didn’t have a crystal ball.
Your statement infers that the US supported them because they were jihadist Sunnis. And that is not true.
In the Iran-Iraq war -- a Sunni vs Shiite affair -- we actually helped both sides -- preferring they bleed each other out. But, admittedly, we leaned toward Saddam and Iraq (the "Sunni" side) since we had a big bone to pick with Iran.
And we assisted the mujahaddin against the Soviets on a premise that had nothing to do with their religious proclivities. They were, after all, fighting the Soviets.
But, if we have always favored the "jihadist Sunnis", how do you explain our firm support for the Shah and his Iran -- which was nonetheless Shiite?
During the Soviet-Afghan War, all our support went to the local Afghan guerilla movements who were for the most part more nationalist than Islamist, such as Ahmed Shah Massoud. Bin Laden and his fellow foreigners had to rely on Saudi and other Gulf Arab money for their support. In fact, bin Laden admitted to Robert Fisk in a interview that he never received any American support.
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