| | Daniel,
For someone who is not an expert, you certainly did a fine job of making a coherent argument!
Right now I have some personal matters to attend to that will prevent me from responding at length. But if you look into the sordid history of the rise of modern state-sponsored terrorism, you will find that there is more in common between the Cold War and the current situation than just institutional bureaucracy and established patterns of thought.
We first sat on our butts because the Cold War was still on with no end in sight. That established a dangerous precedent, but part of the reason we did nothing is that we knew the Sovs were backing it. Hence it fell under your eloquent locked-in-the-closet-with-the-psychopath case.
The Sovs believed that they could never win a straight internal fight for dominance in a country with an elected government that was even moderately committed to the rule of law. Hence, they established terror cells all over the world to place the governments in a position of cracking down and suspending liberty. They figured that if they could make the governments veer to a fascist position, then they could beat that and take over without a shooting war. This was based on their experiences in Cuba and parts of Africa. Most of these efforts fizzled after a couple of decades (but they sure had us scared in the 70s) but its just that in the Middle East the dominant culture was so prepped for that kind of thing anyway that it ballooned out of their control and ultimately outlived them. (To some extent, in the case of Afghanistan, we can say that it in fact buried them.)
The bottom line is that the Sovs were very gifted at terror, secret cells, subversion, propaganda, and destabilizing authoritarian governments. If you look at their history, you see all that goes right back to Lenin vs. the Tsars and even before. So some very, very shrewd, dedicated, experienced people wearing red stars on their shoulders designed the whole terror cell structure and its methods that we are facing today, and trained the trainers. This type of organization is as well designed for its purpose of undermining civilized life as, say, a particularly virulent computer virus is at taking over other peoples' machines.
-Bill
|
|
