Ah, Steve, so the toy shaped bombs all just CIA Psy-War propaganda? Evil lies of A. deBorchgrave(sic.) One of those conservatives whose articles against our impending Iraqi slaughter are forwarded by lefties, Eric Margolis, in his book on the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan (he was a supporter of the Mujahadeen) has photos of the ghastly little devices.
Just did a cursory google, Doctors Without Borders, the French group (founded by a then very left, B. Kouchner, no?) documented this.
As a teenager I read bits of The Pentagon Papers and the Watergate Tapes, The I.F. Stone Rwader that Random House/Vintage put out, bought Monthly Review and NACLA at a great newstand on Hollywood Blvd and carried around like a Bible, Noam Chomsky's first poliitical book, "American Power and the New Mandarins, " (just re-issued by The New Press) so I had early exposure to left ideology and muckracking. (Helped that I grew up in the 'burbs of Washington, D.C., too, in the early 70's. I still have some photos I took of the huge Mobe's against the Vietnam War in the early 70's. Hippies waving NLF flags from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, trade unionists and "suits" looking on bemused.
That some lefties, take that same critical impulse, to such stupid extremes, to deny Crimes by the other Empire, after decades and decades of polemic from everyone from Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman after Kronstadt to http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937-st2/sf02.htm and beyond is just pathetic. Yes, as Doug, and others (and I don't disagree but, I think he and others, not in any sense Soviet apologists, saw that the fSU through it's nuclear deterrant was able to restrain the US Empire a bit...with some help from Vietnamese patriots) lament, in this conjuncture, "the last remaining superpower, " , " or , "the one indespensible nation, " as Albright put it, has little effective opposition, does not bode well for the world.
Closing, I'd recommend, G. Chaliand's, "Revolution In The Third World, " http://www.google.com/search? q=Revolution+In+The+Third+World+Chaliand http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/General/ThirdWorld_def.html Penguin Books. Preface by Wallerstein, blurbed by Chomsky. Chaliand was a press official for the Algerian FLN in the 60's, http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6721.html
and whose first book was, "The Peasants of North Vietnam, " so was steeped in leftist anti-imperialism at it's height. However, by the early 70's, he had come to the conclusion that Soviet type societies and (national liberation movements under Stalinist hegemony, were bound to create) class societies of a new type, neither capitalist or socialist in their modes of production and overall social formation/dynamics, had little to do with the emancipatory impulses of some fellow named Marx. Michael Pugliese