The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story
Angelo Codevilla
The American foreign policy establishment is very blind for variety of reasons. One of the truest things I ever heard when I got to Washington, when I got inside the US intelligence establishment, was that wariest arguments that were going on concerning the Soviet Union were not at all about the Soviet Union. They were about the people next door. People down the hall. The great controversies were among various agencies, various power centers within the agencies, among certain personalities and views about the Soviet Union were made to fit in those struggles, to serve those struggles. So there is another reason for strategic blindness as certain kind of miosis. A certain type of miotic concentration on our own internal difficulties. Then of course the other reason for strategic blindness is the continuing decline quality of personal in American foreign policy establishment. Fewer people have a real acquaintance with the outside world, and they are simply of lower quality. We have tended to choose for high places people who are not abrasive thinkers but people who go along. Who say pleasant things. The Bush’s National Security Council is full of pleasers rather than thinkers and pleasers are not strategists.
The CIA did their best to kill idea that there was a Soviet participation as a sponsor of international terrorism back in the 1970’s which continued till the ridicules nature of their efforts were exposed in 1981.
