--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote: My "best assessment of the real motives for war" suffers from the obstacle common to all assessments-none of the principals has been talking. But the fact that Bush, Cheney, and company had a central idea seems unmistakable to me. Their determination to invade and occupy Iraq says a great deal by itself. A useful way to look at things is to
recall the reaction in Washington to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Sympathy for the Afghans was several places down the list. What most aroused Washington, and American allies in Europe, was the
prospect that the Soviet Union would keep on going to fulfill a longstanding Russian dream of establishing a military presence on the Persian Gulf.
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Actually I am told by people who were in the Soviet government in the 1980s (Yoshie knows who I'm talking about) that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was a reaction to the Iranian Revolution. The Soviet government feared that Khomenism would spread to Afghanistan and that the latter would have an Islamist government, which it then feared would have a destablilizing effect upon the bordering USSR with its 60-million Muslim population, as it eventually did. The main brief of the Soviet military was to ensure that Afghanistan had a secular government, with some ideological blather about "protecting brotherly socialists" thrown in to make the goal consonant with the official ideology. It didn't have much to do with the Persian Gulf.
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