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Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee
AGREE Completely to a tee. These are my thoughts pretty much exactly.
You wonder if he would still have done it back then all for the "prevention of communism" even if he knew that it could blow up to what it is today.
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I think most of that 'prevention' of the 'domino effect' was a whole lot of hooey. I think that's used to absolve people in their own minds of what the realities were on the ground.
To take this back to the original topic of the thread,
Chalmers Johnson talks about the term '
blowback' in the movie
Why We Fight. He's also written fairly extensively on the subject, and I would recommend his writings to those wanting to openly review their own personal beliefs about the cold war, and specifically, the reagan administration. Essentially, blowback is unintended consequences of foreign manipulation. It is not unexpected, but 'unintended', which is a significant detail often overlooked.
For instance, while the bombing of the Marine Barracks in lebanon might have been unintended, it was not 'unexpected' that there would be retaliatory behaviour exhibited by the local militant population against US interests there.
While the cuban missile crisis may have been unintended, possible military reaction from the Soviet Union and/or Cuba was expected.
So while I believe Reagan may have been too crippled by Alzheimers at the time, the rest of his administration would have forseen future reaction to their policies and disregarded them.