Pure squandry by the disciples of Lenin. And they haven't gone away. Eventually they recognized their failure with a strong, united, and technologically superior West to feel threatened by the communist empire. When it failed, they executed a scheme to take covert charge of the 'popular revolution' and still are pulling strings today. The real engineers of the Fall, manipulated many things to make the fall look spontaneous, and 'natural' but the strings were a little too blatant. Reagan does deserve credit for defending us, getting SDI going under the bitter circumstances of an anti-defense Congress, and forcing the Soviets into this gambit. And for whatever freedoms the spin-off state's citizens now have. The Russians meanwhile are slowly but surely fastening the manacles back in place, as their Press is muzzled and controlled once again.
Personally, I continue to feel that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher won the Cold War. Gorbachev lost.
But the day they started tearing it down, I told my wife, we won world war III, but world war IV will be fought in the middle east.
My view of Islam was filtered through the rantings of Yassir Arafat, but I was certain he had a vast hoard behind him, all aimed at Israel.
I'd like to borrow a line from my objectivist friends - when your conclusions point to something this unsatisfactory it's time to "check your premises." "Fluke," after all, is merely a term for something you cannot explain. Liberty in Eastern Europe is not a fluke, it was an ideal tenderly preserved through times of outrageous oppression, nurtured carefully by its adherents on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and allowed to flower in the muck that was the chaos of post-Gorbachev Europe. The conditions that led to this chaos were legion, with more causes and actors than will ever be known, much less listed here. But the goal was always there, and reaching it was not by accident.
Reagan deserves credit for inspiration if for nothing else. His principal function was not to spend the Soviet Union into extinction, it was to raise morale and to remind us that the ideals that had been deliberately marginalized and dismissed during the practiced cynicism of the Carter years were, in fact, real, and their proponents sincere, and most of all, that they were attainable. It is that last that socialism and its proponents have never been able to offer, attainability, and they have, by way of compensation, substituted a contrived world-weariness that held that because their ideals were unattainable all ideals were so, that because their ideals were merely buttons to push to manipulate a desired mass reaction, that all ideals were that as well. It was Reagan who reminded us that this was not the case. He meant it, and between us all, East and West, we proved him right.
Horseshit.
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On the eve of the killings, on January 12, there was a deceptive calmness in the air. There was confusion. We knew Lithuania was on the agenda in Moscow and that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was sending a special delegation to Vilnius. Because the situation was so tense, I spoke several times with the chairman of that delegation on the 12th, urging him to come directly to the Lithuanian capital. But he said he had to go to neighboring Belarus, and that he would spend the night there. I called him again and again to try to persuade him to come straight to Vilnius. But because they didn’t want to be in Vilnius that evening, I felt something was wrong. There was a similar situation in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1989, when unarmed people were massacred by Soviet troops at night. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze stayed in Moscow on the eve of the massacre, and it was said that there was no need for him to go to Tbilisi. The situation in Vilnius was very similar. When the Soviet delegation didn’t agree to come to Vilnius, I was very worried.
That evening, I decided to go home. I wanted to take a bath after being at Parliament for so many days. But when I got home, information came in that the gates were thrown open at Soviet barracks and the tanks were preparing to move. I got home at around midnight, but went back to parliament immediately.
By then, it was clear tanks were moving. You could hear the roar of the tanks. But for a while, we didn’t know what their target was. Then, from inside Parliament, we could hear the shooting of machine guns and tanks, and we could see the gunfire in the night sky.--Vytautas Lansbergis, President of Lithuania
Not a fluke at all. Credit Gerry Ford for the Helsinki Accords that held the Soviets and their satellites to a bare minimum of respect for basic human rights in exchange for desperately needed western trade. While Carter preached ad nasium about human rights, he never understood how to leverage Helsinki or how to stand up to a bully. (I bet he got his butt beat a lot in grade school) Reagan did understand. He beat the Russians over the head with Helsinki and forced them to try to create "Communism with a human face" -- i.e. Gorby. The rest of the analysis is sort of on the mark, but it was Helsinki that created Gorby and using Helsinki as a lever, Reagan broke the back of the Soviet power structure simply by forcing them to quit killing their own people. As to chaos elsewhere, I'd note that in the absence of a Godfather, (the Kremlin), the little gangsters like Saddam will go off in all directions and do their own thing.
HUH?!?
Horsehockey!!!! Tell that to the 13 he slaughtered in Vilnius in 1991.
America was a target of Islamofacists before the fall of the Soviet Union. Remember Libya and Lebanon? Remember Carter and the fall of the Shaw of Iran? And Ayatolla Komeini? America is a target because we are Christian, because we have sympathy for the Jews, and because the Islamofacists must have a bad guy external to their country to unify their people.
It is true that the people of the Soviet Union brought down the Soviet Union. But Reagan deserves a lot of credit. He insisted on calling a spade a spade and made clear to the world that he considered their system of government to be evil. Reagan spoke at Moscow University about basic human rights. He stood at the Berlin wall and shamed Gorbachev into tearing it down. And in his commitment to make sure America was able to defend itself, he did increase the economic burden on the Soviets. Yes it took people within the Soviet Union to listen, to allow those external events to even make news and be discussed inside the Soviet Union, and to eventually stand up and insist on democracy. But to completely say Reagan had no impact, is to ignore history.
Republicans should be flashing the twin towers explosion in the backround with this quote superimposed in campaign ads when they attack their opponents.