{ed notes: I posted this last August on my blog, but I think it frames how we got here. Being a Cold Warrior for 20 years, I stared across the deep blue seas at many a Soviet vessel, many times taking the pictures for the intel files and sending up contact reports – I came to understand the Russians, the culture at the core fo the Soviet Union, have always taken the long view, while we look at life 4 years at a time as a nation. Thie story told has dramatically changed my view of the current “unrest” in the world]
Note on the end before you begin reading. The further I got into reading the subject article, the more I can’t help but think this is one of the most significant bits of intelligence the world has seen to date on the current state of world-wide affairs. It cuts across the lines of history, culture, religion, military affairs, global politics and empire building, but it tells us who is behind it all. Mark my words, it is a definitve article for every serious person to read, and more importantly, one that is worthy of many changing their beliefs on how we got here, and use the information to figure out how to clean up the mess in the aisle known as the World.
Do your own thinking, but this General has provided the “glue” to bind together a multitude of seemingly random events over the last 30+ years.
Scanning about this morning brought me to an article on how the Soviet Union masterminded the use of client states and Muslim discontent to attack us:
The introduction:
The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.â€
If my recollection of history is correct, the Soviets have been none too kind to their Jewish population:
In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy. We also disseminated a KGB-fabricated “documentary†paper in Arabic alleging that Israel and its main supporter, the United States, were Zionist countries dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.
Note: This movie has made it’s way into this country and is now on the shelves at BlockBuster for rent. Thankfully, at least Amazon knows it a faked story. Click on the link above on the title and see what they say.
As Ion points out, that people group, specifically the ones gathered in Israel, became the pawn in the great game of the superpowers in a bi-polar geo-political world, and is now, a classic case study of “unintended consequences.”
At the core, was the embarassment of the Soviets, when their client states, armed with “conventional” weaponry, supplied by the Soviet Unions central economy, had their butts handed to them in the 1967 war. As with the mentaility of most losing teams, while there are still games in the series to be played, you get back in the locker room and look at what happened on film and from personal reports, then you brainstorm a plan to not have it happen again. (Note to all those teachers who think competition among youth in classrooms and on the playing fields is a bad thing: Read this and rethink your position right now) Speaking of personal reports, check this out:
Today’s international terrorism was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general.
I’d say you can’t get much more credible than a personal story of one who was at the table, in the room, and as part of the very first discussion on what we are experiencing today. However, I doubt the left wing, President Bush planned 9/11 conspiracy crowd will be able to honestly accept that it all was conceived, birthed and nurtured by the great Communist “Empire,” and not Bechtel or Halliburton and Dick Cheney. It would, if accepted as the truth that it is, necessarily require them to divest themselves of two major issue at the apex of their discontent:
1) George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Scotter Libby, and, yes, Dick Cheney, and big oil, the capitalist military industrial complex and “the rich” (except the ultra rich liberals from Hollywood and the Heinz families) are not to blame for the world wide terrorist movement, the domain of those who adhere to the teachings of the Koran.
and
2) Communism is, in fact, a force for evil, and while they have been removed from governing most nation-states, their heritage of tyranny, oppression, and creation of human misery carry on.
Side note: Doing this would cause the rest of their actions/rheotric to become also menaingless by association with two top level assumptions that are now shown to be incorrect. Interestingly enough, the rapid environmentalists have painted themselves into a very similar corner, it seems….Advice to anyone with an extreme argument: Know that the actual facts, read: The Trurh, or any one thing is not always apparent at the outset of your intial investigation. Lave room for the truth to come along and help your see the issue more clearly/credibily. See my book report on a well written, yet readable story of science and mankind, or discredited assumptions and theories, that did lead to greater, more precise truths.
The outcome of this desire to get back at the US, via fomenting hatred of Israel and Jewish people is affecting the world wide economy, and, in the cultural landscape of today, are resonsible for us (the world community of humanity) driving wedges between various groups of people. The bottom line for all those who didn’t figure out that Karl Mark prepetrated the most extensive “practical joke” on all of mankind, is that that the end result of socialism and Communism, is not the great utopia they all crave. For the record of those who are not away, the devastating irony of Karl Marx’s political and cultural theory is he was a retired industrialist when he published his idea. He had alrady extracted the sweat equity from the “proletariat,” and was living in luxury as a result. He suckered V.I. Lenin and company into taking it out for a 70 year spin, reusulting in miliions upon millions of deaths from the collective farms of Russia, to the killing fields of Cambodia, and more recently, as we find out, the Marine Barracks in Beruit, the World Trade Centers, various embassies of several nations, in the skies over Lockerbee, Scotland, at Munich, in Mogadishu, Dufar in Sudan, and daily in the streets of Baghdad, but those are merely a few instances.
My analysis: Communism is the most destructive social cancer we face today, which, strangley enough, is worshipped by the leftists, who also want us to embrace each and every human as worthy and equal (and I don’t disagree with that at all, as a goal). “Useful Idiots” defines these leftists properly, and Oh, BTW, that’s a term invented by Lenin, for those who he could use to further his own goals of Communism.
Before you read further, H/T: LT Smash, the first MilBlogger, for leading me to this jewel of an article.
Eagle1 at Eagle Speak discusses how the Germans in WWI used similar tactics, while using Iran.
Thanks to Little Green footballs for running an outstanding blog!
Trackbacked at:
Samantha Burns
Don Surber: Why they Hate Us
But…..While a published idea of communism wasn’t available to mankind until the late 1800’s, there were attempts at signifiicant socialism, the economic core of the Communist political model, have been tried throughout human existence. It has failed before, and still is shown as not a vialble alternative. In it’s modern form, this “entity” had learned how to take the culture of a once dominant “poligion” (my own term, thank you…conjugation of “politics” and “religion”) known as Islam, and rekindle it’s imperialistic practices and manipulate them to do their bidding. They picked a winner, hence my titling of this post. For those who disagree, I invite you to do an intelligent and unbiased study of world history from 622 to 1682 AD, and then return for a thoughtful, fact based discussion on the matter at hand.
Some time back, I had someone on a talk show state something like this: “Countries with oil do not develop thier people.” In a moment of reflection, that rings very true. Add to this point a further lesson from Plato:
Man, as we say, is a tame and civilized animal; nevertheless, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill educated he is the most savage of earthly creature.
Followed by this one by Henry Brougham in 1828::
Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
When those three thoughts are melded, consider the effectiveness of “mind control” over an entire culture. Guess who figured out where to find the “proxy” to carry out the strategy and look at the logic:
According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.
Yep, none other than Uri Andropov, the head of the KGB. By derivation, I’d say Andropov was a student of Plato and he understood they were just “heads full of mush,” as Rush Limbaugh says, but he is referring to youth, not yet educated. In this case, it’s adutls, who never got a real education beyond “Kill the infidel.” Interestingly enough, it took the godless Communists to point this out to the Muslims. Why Don’t they want to listen to us when we try to talk to them?
Major points of the methodology:
- It’s a proxy war, carried out by groups, not nation states (and it began back in the 60s).
- The focus was on Israel
- The strategy not unlike holding a loved one at gunpoint, while demanding surrender of the police who respond to the incident
- “We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles.”
Read what, quite arguably by students of conflict, a very wise strategist, said:
General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who created Communist Romania’s intelligence structure and then rose to head up all of Soviet Russia’s foreign intelligence, often lectured me: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.â€
He has become, by practical observation, oh so correct. It’s clear, when an ICBM lands within your national boundaries, that the shooter has in fact, declared war, unambigiously, upon you. With a terror attack, the question becomes (review news reports of the “lone gunman” who killed and wounded Jewish women in Seatlle recently) a endlessly debated question: “was that really an attack by a nation-state upon us, clearly an act of war, or the actions of a few crazy people, acting alone?”
Clear the decks now for this thought: With every passing moment, with every passing of a human, black, white, brown, yellow, red, Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, German, English, American, Sunni, Shite, Republican, Democrat, Green, Devil Worshiper, etc, etc, World War III continues and the death toll, begun on defined geopgraphic battlefields of Korea and Vietnam and also carried out in the skies above (ELINT aircraft shootdowns), on (USS PEUBLO) and under (help me out sub guys with comments, if the classification has expired. was USS SCORPION part of this?) international waters. The battlefield now is anywhere the urge strikes one of the players, that is sufficiently unguarded. The directly involved on the battle field no longer suit up in jungle cammies with tiger stripes, but in the finest clothing a well to do clothing store can offer to business executives, and malls to teenagers.
Until this moment, I chafed when commentators called the current war on terror by this title, personally perferring to name it “WW IV,” but I see now, the World War, begun in 1945 with the Soviet Block, is still very much with us, so I will revert to using “WWIII.”
Silly us, and it was President Eisenhower who essentailly, but his massive budgets shifts, told us that nuclear arms have made armies obsolete. President Kennedy, on the other hand, was the one who worked to begin a trend in military forces of the free world of using special forces to leverage off of the discontent of local populations, to help “contain” Communist expansions.”
Analysis: The Republicans, while saying the same thing as General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, didn’t get that you had to replace an obsolete military capability with an effective one. The Democrats, had they not lost a President with vision, might have helped have this turn out a completely different way. Ironically now, the Republicans seek more special forces within the DoD, and the Democrats want to abandon any military force use, preferring to replace it with more law enforcement efforts. I guess at one level, you can understand a bunch of lawyers (the larval stage of politician) would come up with such a plan, yet a business minded leader, who had not spent a life in politics and law, would view it as the ultimate in competitions, in which case the fielded teams are put out to won,. not to merely hold the other team at bay. I commented on this thought process, but for a different reason last year with this post: “The Value of the Military Skill Set – Part XII: Red Blood or Red Ink”
Quite honestly, back in the late 80s and early 90s, having become a degreed student of the history of human conflict, I often thought that fall of the Soviet empire was yet another large scale effort at disinformation. The Soviet mindset was always in it for the long haul, and it’s history filled with operations, large and small of disinformation (see notes on analysis of the MiG-25 Victor Belenko flew into Japan with). I spoke of the idea of this being a major facade a few times, thinking that the face of the countries turning to western style democracy, most significantly in my reckoning was Russia, was but a ruse to have us let our guard down. I particulary considered those thoughts as the massive defense cutback backs begun under George Bush 41, but rapidly accelerated in timing by Bill Clinton, came home to roost in the later days of my career, when lack of and cut budgets were the order of the day, along with the message to “deal with it!” Under pinning my thoughts were how the money was not being taken from the DoD, and “returned” to the tax payers by no longer demanding the cash, but taxes still being levied, and then funding massive increases in social funding, complimented by Hillary Clinton’s series of secret meetings to socialize the entire health care system of the US. Add to that the technology transfers to China of ballistic missile targeting equipment, as campaign “contributions” to Bill Clinton and the Democrats rolled in, and I believe I was not wrong in supposing something wasn’t quite right in the world. No blogs back then for me to wonder out loud in cyberspace, and it certainly would have sounded like a nutball conspiracy theory at the time, or just plain old “hate the current president” bashing, rather than being looked upon as a serious topic of discussion.
So here we are now, the Soviet Union, collapsed and split apart, back into the nation-states that existed prior to WWII and the Yalta Conference, when nations were absorbed with amoeba like action by Russia to form “the Motherland’s” buffer zone from invasion, but their war against us continues. Another large irony: They nutured this type of warfare, and gave it enough to have it operate autonomusly. Kind of a twist on the plot of the movie “War Games.” Substitute a conglomeration of Islamic terrorist groups/cells for the out of control computer about to launch ICBMs at the Soviet Union, and you have the real life situation today, except these guys “pull the trigger.”
An even more unfortunate consequence of the strategy playing out, set in motion to bring us down, and just like air spraying chemical or biological agents on enemy forces near your own front lines, if the wind shifts, your own forces suffer the same deliterious effects as do “the emeny” troops. Likewise for the employment of nuclear waeponry in the atmosphere. All of humanity is eventually affected by such actions. The brutality of Beslan is also the natural result of developing and deploying a weapon of terror, let alone the much under reported conflict between Chechnya and Russia, where Muslims rebels have become a dominant separtist movment within the borders of “The Motherland.”
So how does Afghanistan in the 70’s fall in to this discussion? Was it the first taste of an out of control movement the Soviet saw, and entry into battle with their own developed “special forces” was to be a spanking and lesson for the Islamics? If the quoted article is completely true, then another irony is by our supplying the Afghan rebels with technology and money during the cold war, we had, for a moment done a turing of the tables, using their own weapon against them. That, as I consider the situation, has most likely led to the problems the soviets see internally. We “redirected” the water flow of the broken dam, but an awful lot of it still flows out way.
Very much like entites such as the Mafia and the large drug cartels starting out with control over the flow of illegal substances or activities, and then some (criminal minded) enterepaneurers come along and start working on the fringes. These “extra players,” drawn in for the huge payoff (in this case money, in the terror case, the fame/ticket to Paradise), are out of the span of control of the normal chain of command, and eventualy, being able to be responsive at a level that a large organization cannot be, become more significant players within the arena or crime/conflict.
From another angle, this article also shows that the methods used by the current day forces have not been developed by the Muslims, pointing to a lack of education and initiative on the part of the Islamic terrorists. It seems their “tool box” was laoded up with high level Soviet military minds:
The terrorist war per se came into action at the end of 1968, when the KGB transformed airplane hijacking — that weapon of choice for September 11, 2001 — into an instrument of terror. In 1969 alone there were 82 hijackings of planes worldwide, carried out by the KGB-financed PLO. In 1971, when I was visiting Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka office, he called my attention to a sea of red flags pinned onto a world map hanging on the wall. Each flag represented a captured plane. “Airplane hijacking is my own invention,†he claimed.
Note that the date of that conversation long preceeded the date of 2001….
The location of the battlefield was also defined in Russia:
The political “success†occasioned by hijacking Israeli airplanes prompted the KGB’s 13th Department, known in our intelligence jargon as the “Department for Wet Affairs†(wet being a euphemism for bloody), to expand into organizing “public executions†of Jews in airports, train stations, and other public places. In 1969 Dr. George Habash, a KGB puppet, explained: “Killing one Jew far away from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention.â€
The end of the article points out that the dictatoral leadership of the Soviet Union, which was spared from being de-throned as the Nazis were at Nuremburg, have had their positons of power and influence all these years in combatting the west. General Pacepa also concludes, that current Russian pracitces of supplying arms and technology and “top cover” to not only terrorist organizations, but to terrorist minded nation-states, such as Iran, have the complete opportunity to turn on the very supporters of the strategy:
We should also help the Russians realize that it is in their own interest to make President Ahmadinejad renounce nuclear weapons. He is an unpredictable tyrant who may also consider Russia an enemy at some point in time. “If Iran gets weapons of mass destruction, deliverable by a missile, that’s going to be a problem,†President Bush correctly stated. “That’s going to be a problem for all of us, including Russia.â€
If nothing else, the most critical lesson of the war the Soviets had in Afghanistan should show anyone interacting with the Islamic mind that they will use you for what you provide, yet provide you no alliegence in return.
The bottom line: Be careful what you wish for, consider decisions large or small carefully, think for the long term, and know uneducated people can be manipulated, but they can’t be bought off and that the stuggles of mankind, between the “Super Powers” of the 50-90s continue.