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COMMENTS:
*to the displeasure *
Voted : The cold war was never over
russia never changed. never. the cold war may have officially ended in the publics view, but it's been going strong. russia just retreated on the public stage but kept the same mentality. so did we for that matter.
Voted : The cold war is over
The paranoia rampant now is but a whisper in comparison to those grand old days. Out of HS, was accepted at three service academies (West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs) and I chose Annapolis because of one thing only- submarines. When the bombs went up, I planned on being several hundred feet below the surface, and had extensively studied Australian history, knowing that, in the event of things going hairy, I'd be living there. Now, the only reason I'm contemplating moving is because of rank incompetence at the highest levels of Guv'mint.
Voted : The cold war is reheating up
Beware the looming unholy alliance of Russia, China, and Iran.
Voted : The cold war is over
The Russia that I was taught to fear is no more. And it was never really what we thought it was anyway. All flash no cash.
China is in a position to destroy us, but from an economic point and not by military force.
The Cold War could be restarted by stupidity, and it looks as if we're headed in that direction.
Voted : The cold war is not over
damm russians
by ABC on Wed Jun 06, 07 10:26am
[+]
Ask Vladimir Putin? He seems hell-bent on cranking it up. Just like Bush, he needs a war to stay i power.
Voted : The cold war was never over
I don't think so.
The reason is because the Cold War was the first U.S. war which was not a real war. World War II and the use of the first atomic bombs set the stage for a complete redefining of the nature of war. The main implication of nuclear weaponry is obvious: the effective elimination of the "battlefield" in any conventional sense. No more open, direct, large-scale military conflicts between nation-states in possession of devices capable of wreaking obliteration on a scale we can still barely imagine; and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small. The ballpark figure of the total number of people killed instantly by the two bombs is about ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND - with that figure doubling from death due to injury and the effects of radiation. The global psychological impact of living in a world in which the human race could easily annihilate every one and everything on the planet has driven people to a justifiable depth of terror absolutely unprecedented in the history of the human race.
With the conventional battlefield rendered effectively obsolete, the Cold War expanded to ideological proportions, which know no physical boundaries. This is why the Cold War manifested itself on every continent except Antarctica. We avoided direct conflict with the Soviet Union by covertly funding and supporting any and every armed group, force, or movement deemed friendly or allied with American democratic/capitalist interests and unfriendly or allied with Soviet communist/socialist interests. Basically, we fought communist world hegemony with democratic world hegemony. The most notorious proxy war is of course Vietnam, but the one which had the worst long-term consequences was definitely Afghanistan in the 1980s. Afghanistan demonstrates how proxy wars best serve the interests of the Government, because few people understand how our funding, training, and equipping of the mujahideen is directly connected to the terrorist attacks of 2001. Ronald Reagan is seen by by far too many as a great American hero. Of course, you can't blame him for anything, because you can't blame ANYONE in Government for anything relating to proxy wars and expect it to matter.
Long story short: Among the 10,000+ mujahideen who received covert U.S. military resources and funds and were employed by the CIA (in collaboration with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI) to wage their jihad against the Soviet occupation - were the founders or key members of virtually every terrorist organization which came into being in the 80s and 90s. We employed the founder of Hamas (Azzam); the "blind Sheikh" who perpetrated the FIRST attack on the World Trade Center in 1993; and one Osama Bin Laden, as a major contractor on a mountain tunnel complex (arms depot/training facility/medical center) in Khost, Afghanistan. The rest is history.
The point is that you cannot wage "war" against immaterial (or non-specific) things and expect there to be some final conclusion. That's why the Cold War never really ended, that's why the War on Drugs will never end, and that's why the so-called War on Terror will never end.
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