I had never read the Kennon telegram and it was quite interesting. Certainly he was correct and the US was able to hold out long enough to see the USSR collapse, but they too had successes. As Kennon predicted, the Russians did everything they could to support groups that would create internal problems for the capitalist countries. Perhaps if we had "settled Russian hash" in the 50's we might not have had to suffer through many of the events of the 60s and 70s. The old line about who changes when you dance with the devil is at least half right; the US certainly didn't come out of the cold war unscathed.

Mark Steyn is God’s own voice on earth! OK, I’m kidding.

Half kidding.

I think you’ve got it, and him, wrong. In Steyn’s writings in a larger sense, he has expressed profound unease with the inroads of Muslim culture into the West. But one senses, and reads explicitly, that his primary concern is not “them’, but rather “us”. Steyn might think of Muslim immigrants rather like Grizzly bears, if I may. Now, condescending, or even insulting that may be to compare such people to the animal kingdom, let’s set that aside.

Grizzly bears may be quite beautiful, and one can certainly argue they have as much right to space on this earth as we do. But how should we react when a bear invades a schoolyard and tears four children apart?

Steyn will tell you exactly how we in the West react to such “bears”. “Oh, how awful, but really…. ( I say from my well fortified house miles from any bear)… aren’t they just being bears? Aren’t WE in THEIR way? What nerve have we to judge the bears for doing what bears have always done? And, DAMN that Mayor Busch for building a school there to start with?? What did he expect?

“Did you see the bear run from the schoolyard after the kil… um, unfortunate events? What grace! What beauty! Such magnificent creatures! Maybe, I say…. (STILL sitting in my well fortified house miles from any bear)…. those poor kids are just the price we have to pay to get along with the earth”, etc etc.

Ad nauseum.

Styen’s point is that THEY (Them!!! Horrors!) would not be a problem, immigrant or not, if WE (our cultural, academic, media, and political elites) had the simple balls to stand up for what our fathers and our father’s fathers stood up for. Kennan’s Long Telegram did just that. And we are incapable of repeating it because our “betters” are utterly incapable of saying, “yes, bears WILL be bears, and that’s why we should enjoy them in our national parks and be prepared to shoot them stone dead in our schoolyards if they arrive there, and, MOST importantly, do the latter without it even occurring to us that we should apologize for it.”

Fail to do that, and the bears will eat our lunch, and more. That’s what bears do.

(Addendum: That last para is NOT NOT NOT about shooting anybody. Allegory, folks allegory. It IS about drawing red lines, particularily for guests to our house... I mean.. immigrants... that "Thou shalt NOT cross, and we are not prepared to debate about it. That is where our elites are catastophic failures, mine and Steyn's point.

Now back to your regularily scheduled broadcast.)

Except that turning a blind eye to the murder of over a hundred million people caused the rot in the West.

Was "turing a blind eye" a cause for the rot, or an effect of the rot?

I agree. Those elites turn a blind eye today to Saddam's thuggery, to the inevitable results of turning our back on Iraq, to Darfur, if it requires any hard lifting other than sanctimonious bloviating, etc etc.

Mr. Steyn, again, some time ago, put it as well as any human can.

---

It must be great to be the guy with the printing contract for the "FREE TIBET" stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. Are you in favor of a Free Tibet? It's hard to find anyone who isn't. Every college in America is. There's the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin—Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan chapter, and the University of Montana Students for a Free Tibet in Missoula, which is where they might as well relocate the last three Tibetans by the time it is freed.

..

(They are) advertising their moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, 'Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,' the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They'd have to bend down and peel off the 'FREE TIBET' stickers and replace them with 'WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.'"

But there'll never be a Free Tibet--because, through all the decades Americans were driving around with the bumper stickers, the Chinese were moving populations, torturing Tibetans, imposing inter-marriage until Tibet was altered beyond recognition. By the time the guys with the Free Tibet stickers get around to freeing Tibet there'll be no Tibet left to free."

---

Voice of...... ;-)

You the man Andrew! You the man.

(They are) advertising their moral superiority, not calling for action

The person who sports a "Free Tibet"-type sticker is a moral exhibitionist. In our present culture it's only necessary to appear to be doing something to be able to claim that one does "not do evil." And you damn well want everyone to know that, hence the self-promotion.

Mr. Steyn has commented on your post at the Corner. Sorry, I'm too stupid to link.

Mark Steyn on OJ above -

"That's very true. One of the themes of my book is that there's no such thing as "stability". Choosing to "contain" the Soviet Empire over four decades did enormous damage not just in terms of the vassel populations and the millions of ruined lives..."

Hey! That means Steyn agrees with you! And he's always right! And he's right that your right that he's wrong here. But that means.... that....he's wrong about being right.... or right about being wrong..... or else.... LANDRU...... LANDRU..... AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh! (smoke and flames ensue)

Cause. The Right wanted to fight the USSR and gave the Left the New Deal/Great Society/Age of Aquarius as the price of their support.

brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/864

Indeed. The underlying notion of the Realist preference for stability is that not only doesn't it matter if totalitarians murder and oppress their own people but it tends to keep them out of our hair.

The Long Telegram set the course for US foreign policy because it fitted US purposes. It pointed a way to keep communism out of free countries while avoiding globally devastating direct war between the superpowers.

There isn't a similar document for the WoT because the strategy that the Bush admin had - turn Iraq into a liberal democracy and encourage democracy elsewhere in the Middle East - has taken far more time, energy, blood and money than was envisaged at the outset. Also, aside from the spectacular one-off that was 9/11, Islamic terrorists have mostly been restricted to maiming and killing in Muslim countries.

A basic appraisal of the financial and military resources available to terrorists doesn't show they pose much of a threat to the West.

So it's natural to be fairly relaxed about the danger, make the appropriate cooing noises about the need to respect diversity and be dismissive when Norman Podhoretz calls it a bigger threat than communism or fascism and wants the 82nd Airborne sent to Iran, a broke country with a military inferior to Mexico's and the worst case of brain-drain in the world.

Anyway, since nobody's asking here's my Telegram:

1) Keep the boot on Islamic terrorists and their sympathisers. But do it quietly, cheaply and unobtrusively by means of police, decent intelligence, anti-terrorist units and when necessary, Special Forces.

2) Encourage economic liberalisation in the Muslim world. Having jobs around dries up the supply of hotheads willing to blow themselves up. And citizens with prospects and aspirations are likely to be far more effective in calling for political reform than the occasional call from the State Department.

Other than that, the danger isn't significant enough to devote that much efort to.

PS: It's Dewsbury, not Dewesbury.

Sounds pretty good to me, Ali.

Ali, please. We warbloggers are frontline soldiers in the Longest-est War on Islamo-Terror-Libero-Fascism (World War Five, technically speaking). Obviously it is the defining struggle of our time, along with the War on the War on Terror (World War Three), and the War on Christian Funeral Protests (World War Four). So don't waste your breath trying to convince us that we're not literally the greatest heros in Western Civilization, because we totally are.

Now I'm off to read Glenn Reynolds's latest post about the best coffee makers.

To the extent that Kennan was responsible for our not settling Soviet hash in the late 40s, he (and we) enabled the repression and mass murder of a significant portion of the human population for a disturbingly extended period of time. The cost of his accuracy was catastrophic to them and morally disabling to us. Four decades of compromising with evil, etc, etc

We should have gone to war with the USSR in the late 1940s? Are you completely insane? Do you know how many tanks they had? How many troops? The US couldn't even conquer North Korea in 1950, and you think they could have taken Russia?

No. Why would we take the USSR? We didn't want it. But we could have decapitated the Party quite easily.

Dr:

That's all the same war:

www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1400/

A good part of the reason why we didn't settle the Soviet Union's hash was because a) we weren't 100% sure we could do it and b) even if we could, the methods we'd have to employ would have led to the deaths of millions of people.

With regard to a), we overestimated Soviet military strength quite a bit (anyone reading this interested in the subject can go find a copy of Matthew Evangelista's Stalin's Postwar Army Reappraised): even so, it would have taken a lot of effort to overcome them in a conventional conflict, which brings us to b). We understimated, at the time, the likely number of deaths that would have been caused by us launching a first strike, but the estimate at the time was still, to quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, after he read some briefs on the subject, that we'd leave the USSR and its allies "a smoking, irradiated ruin at the end of two hours."

We retained the ability to "settle the USSR's hash" pretty much into the Kennedy administration. Of course, in the process of doing so, we would have freed a large chunk of the populace enslaved there by incinerating them, and left most of the remainder in something like the conditions they lived in after the Mongol invasion of Russia, with the added problem that they'd be dealing with huge swathes of radioactive contamination.

Curtis Lemay used to argue that was a good trade for us, but almost no one else agreed with him. It's worth noting that President Eisenhower (and Vice President Nixon) both thought it would have been a bad idea.

Whoops! I made a mistake. I misattributed the quote: Curtis LeMay told President Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile crisis, that SAC could reduce the USSR to a smoking irradiated ruin at the end of two hours.

Eisenhower did tell people that he didn't see the point in destroying the USSR, but I was conflating two different people with two very different attitudes.

But we could have decapitated the Party quite easily.

By, what, incinerating every major city in the Soviet Union? Just wanting to be clear here.

The latest a nuclear attack on the USSR could have been made with impunity was 1948. (In 1949 the USSR tested its first nuclear weapon, RDS-1 or "Joe One). In 1948, the US had 110 fission-only "Fat Man" type nuclear weapons. But the B-36 bombers which would (in theory) carry the US nuclear deterrent from CONUS to the USSR did not come into service until the end of the year; only 21 training models had been delivered by 1948. Any nuclear attack on the USSR would have been made with B-29s.

With a range of less than 3,000 nm, the B-29s would have had to operate from bases in western Europe - well within range of conventional counterforce strikes by the Soviets. (They would also have needed permission from the local governments. Would the UK have permitted a first strike in 1948 against the USSR? Would France?)

As well, at their combat altitude of 40,000ft, the B-29s would have been within range of the USSR's MiG-9 and YaK-15 jet interceptors. Without their own fighter support - no US fighters had the range - the B-29s would have been in trouble. Many would not have got through. The USSR, unlike Japan, was a hard target when it came to air defence.

Those that did would have faced the normal problems of bombing in the 1940s - chiefly navigation and accuracy. Using only small Fat Man type weapons, a miss by five miles (common in ww2 bombing) would have meant little or no damage to the target. Cloud would have hidden many of the targets from aircraft at 40,000 feet - and the pilots would be completely unfamiliar with navigating over the USSR.

Nor, of course, would they have been able to reach the entire USSR. The war capital of Kuibyshev and much of the Ural industrial area would have remained out of reach (including the USSR's own atomic weapon programme).

As for decapitating the Party, the idea is ludicrous. There were plenty of bomb shelters. At their piston-engined cruising speed, the B-29s would have given hours of warning of an impending raid - easily enough time for the Politburo to get out of central Moscow, even if they had to do so on foot.

No, just Moscow.

See last paragraph.

There's a funny bit in Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun where LeMay wants to do the USSR and the Beltway types raise all the same trivial objections about the impossibility of a successful strike. So LeMay starts running simulated bombing runs over Russia, just to show how helpless they'd be against him.

And yet, the USSR did fall and massive nuclear strikes never happened. Diplomacy works and people thrive -- there are few examples of war/conquering armies changing the political landscape for the better. What we need against Al Quida and their ilk is a new kind of war -- something like Israel's response to the Munich massacre. But Bush's fumbling massive Iraq war backfires and Al Quida is stronger than ever.

So LeMay starts running simulated bombing runs over Russia, just to show how helpless they'd be against him.

Because, as we all know, the result of simulations are always 100% accurate.

I do think that we could have probably launched a first strike on the USSR, without almost no Soviet retaliation on the Continental US (Europe, on the other hand, and US forces there, would have been devastated), but LeMay was maintaining that long after it ceased to be true.

What "forty years of compromise with evil" is the author talking about?

Has he got a clue what the cold war was about? Or Viet Nam? The entire article is full of obfuscation like that.

Keenan is anathema to the neo-cons, but if all you are going to do is use him to make your points in the midst so much deception, you don't do your cause a favor.

Nonny:

A simulation where you overfly the enemy and he can't do anything about is indeed 100% accurate.

Mr. Sen:

The Cold War isn't terribly complex. Recognizing that USSR wasn't a serious threat to us and couldn't succeed domestically all that was required of us was to outwait them and they'd fold.

It worked brilliantly, unless you're Russian, Chinese, Polish, Czech, Afghani, Cambodian, Cuban...

Munich worked. There is a Palestine.

oj: it worked pretty well for them too, given that none of them were killed by your preferred option, a massive US nuclear bombardment of Moscow.

None of them were killed? That's too extravagantly historically ignorant for you to be serious.

OJ: You forgot to add Venezuelan, Bolivian, Peruvian, and Ecuadorian. Also Zimbabwean, Namibian, Mozambiquean, and others.

psmarc93: Al Qaeda is stronger than ever? Only in your dreams. Oh, and did the conquering armies in 1918 and 1945 "change" things for the better? How about 1865? 1781?

Nonny: LeMay had bombers flying over Russian territory many times. All they had to do was open the bomb bay doors. The Soviet leadership was paranoid (at times) because we wanted it that way. Their wasn't anything approaching strategic balance until probably 1968.

OJ: Yes, according to CIA and Pentagon reports Al Queda is stronger than ever. Not in Iraq, but then they were formed after 2003 as a result of our occupation and only represented 4% of the violence in the civil war currently raging at their worst. But, yes, in Pakistan and in Afgahnistan, it is acknowleged by our government that they are stronger than ever.

It also has been successfully pointed out that the horror of WWI and its NONdiplomatic ending created the horror of Hitler and WWII. Same with our war between the states, few Southerners believe that the horrors of that war improved their lot -- in fact the war decimated half of our nation for more than 100 years. Of course, the winning side smugly believes its punishment, even though we all have suffered from a war solution rather than a diplomatic one.
Generally, the rise of diplomacy over the past 200 years has been the enlightened realization that was destroys both conquered and conquerer. As long as nations are talking, their people are not dying.
There are necessary wars, of course. But conquering the USSR (or Iraq) are not very good examples.

OJ: Yes, according to CIA and Pentagon reports Al Queda is stronger than ever. Not in Iraq, but then they were formed after 2003 as a result of our occupation and only represented 4% of the violence in the civil war currently raging at their worst. But, yes, in Pakistan and in Afgahnistan, it is acknowleged by our government that they are stronger than ever.

It also has been successfully pointed out that the horror of WWI and its NONdiplomatic ending created the horror of Hitler and WWII. Same with our war between the states, few Southerners believe that the horrors of that war improved their lot -- in fact the war decimated half of our nation for more than 100 years. Of course, the winning sides smugly believe suffering is fitting for the loser... even though all have suffered from a war solution rather than a diplomatic one. Both sides suffer.
Generally, the rise of diplomacy over the past 200 years has been the enlightened realization that war destroys both conquered and conquerer. As long as nations are talking, their people are not dying.
There are necessary wars, of course. But conquering the USSR (or Iraq) are not very good examples.

That would be the same CIA and Pentagon that thought the USSR would overtake us economically by the 1990s or the ones that thought Saddam had WMD or that the Cubans had advisors in Nicaragua because there were baseball fields? Before 9-11 there was an al Qaedist government in Afghanistan. There isn't one today nor will there ever be another. They lost.

Yes, the failure to liberate the colonies after WWI was the key mistake, more disastrous than WWI itself, WWII or the Cold War--none of which were necessary and all of which went badly.

rat:

And the inner city blacks and the 40 million victims of Roe and so on and so forth. The compromises required to not fight the war were corrosive and murderous.

Ohhhhh the suffering that could have been avoided by a well-timed war. I makes one weep. When I think of how the English could have saved American slaves if they had invaded (again) in 1830 or how the French could have spared Native Americans from genocide if Napolean hadn't been weak-in-the-knees and limited his ambition to Europe. History shows us, after all, that decapitation of troublesome governments leads to instant enlightenment among the occupied population.

Slavery would have been abolished had we stayed under the Crown. The Indian were toast no matter what.

Precisely right about the decapitation as your Napoleon citation demonstrates.

None of them were killed? That's too extravagantly historically ignorant for you to be serious.

Indeed no. Number of Russians killed by a massive US nuclear bombardment of Moscow - zero.

I know you have difficulty reading entire posts, but could you at least try reading entire sentences?

Bingo! Your position depends on ignoring the tens of millions killed by our failure to liberate Eastern Europe. So long as foreigners lives are insignificant, your isolationism is perfectly rational. That's what makes rationalism repellant.