<< >That's right. And the CIA's new explanation is ridiculous.
Not necessarily. You have never worked in a bureaucracy, have you?
>>
I agree with Brad. Imperialism is at least as stupid as it is evil. I mean, look, we sent a man with a cake shaped like a key to see if he could pry the American hostages loose from Iran. Or, try this: My Soviet studies prof in grad school, Matthew Evangelista, published a paper in the 80s called Stalin's Postwar Army, in which he showed that evidence was available in Western intelligence reports that Stalin wasn't going to be invading anyone in aftermath of WWII; the USSR was just too fucked up. They were calling on the Army for the harvest; they had no rolling stock; their industrial base was demolished. Paul Nitze, the man who as much as any single person made the Cold War with his (in)famous National Security Council Document 68 (1950), warning of immanent Soviet takeover of everything, was, at the time the paper came out, an important Reagan admin official. Matt heard from reliable sources that Nitze mobilized his staff to work up a report to discover whether what Matt said was true. (The report is still classified; I tried to pry it loose under FOIA a few years ago.) Apparently Nitze had no idea of what WWII had done to the Soviets although he actually had all the information available to him from hsi own intelligence sources.
--jks