continued S.’s Email

We forget that there is an entire generation of Arab dictators and terrorists — from Arafat to Saddam Hussein — who were trained or welcomed in Moscow, and who predicated their policies on the idea that Soviet intelligence, Soviet weapons, Soviet money, and Soviet opposition to America could provide them a degree of security otherwise unwarranted by their own resources or ability. The first Gulf War would never have occurred had Saddam Hussein convinced his tottering patron Mr. Gorbachev to do the usual Russian thing of threatening us with nuclear-tipped missiles — or had the Iraqis waited until 1995 or so, to acquire through an indigenous nuclear program what they had lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union.In that context alone should we understand the race by Middle Eastern tyrants and despots to acquire weapons of mass destruction. WMD is a polite name for some sort of surrogate Soviet nuclear deterrent, [of the sort used] to coerce or blackmail the United States from acting freely to promote the establishment of democratic government and freedom and the removal of terrorist enclaves.A liar like “Baghdad Bob” — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the so-called Baathist “information” minister — did not learn his craft reading the Arabian Nights, or from the braggadocio and tribal mythmaking of the Arab coffeehouse. No, he was a product of the Baathist police apparatus — and thus indirectly of Soviet-style disinformation protocols, according to which lies in service of a criminal state were not really lies at all. If the West shudders at the state-controlled untruth in the Arab world, it should remember that the closer a state’s former ties with the Soviet Union — whether it be Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine Authority, or Libya — the greater propensity it displays for censorship, fabrication, and an intrusive Big Brother.

Perhaps the biggest change is in the nature of terrorism itself. Gone are most Russian and Eastern European money and training for hijackers and assassins. The Czech or Bulgarian police are more likely to round up killers than to subsidize them as they did in the past. Polish commandos help Americans fight terrorists rather than helping terrorists to fight Americans. Berlin is not a haven for spies with Middle Eastern operations, but is rather undergoing a massive construction to return it to its former status as Europe’s premier capital. In short, the playing field of the terrorist has shrunk considerably, as a fourth of the planet has suddenly done an about-face and joined in to stop rather than foster killers.

Our own defense capability reflects these new opportunities. That we may soon move 80,000 military personnel out of Germany would have been impossible in the Cold War. With such new flexibility, should Turkey or Saudi Arabia forbid use of their bases, why should we be paying material and political capital for runways and hangars in the first place when we cannot use them? Suddenly the old paradigm — that we had to scheme with rightists to gain their soil to corner the Soviet Union — no longer matters; instead the renter, not the landlord, now holds the greater hand, as we craft our armed forces to be more mobile, flexible, and independent from blackmail or coercion, from “friends” and neutrals alike.That we are refitting some of our nuclear submarines with conventional cruise missiles to take out terrorists, rather than to strike Soviet cities, is also the kind of new thinking that has in it an ominous message for rogue states once protected under the old Soviet nuclear umbrella. If the free world has now doubled or tripled in size, so have American military resources, to focus on a diminishing terrorist stronghold. We fought so well in Afghanistan and Iraq in part precisely because we now have the freedom to devote our efforts to unconventional warfare without worrying that we are shorting our heavy armor and tactical aircraft — once so critical to stopping a Soviet assault in Europe. Ten thousand Special Forces may not have kept the Russians from blasting into Germany, but they were invaluable in Afghanistan and Kurdistan. Lumbering B-52s might have been blown out of the skies by Soviet Migs, but they rained fire and ruin on the Taliban with impunity.With the demise of the Soviet Union perished also the idea of spreading Marxism by force across the globe. Our enemies could always bring in the Russians if we proved too demanding of reform; cynical neutrals could play us off against them to gain aid or attention.