Things We Have the Conservatives to Thank For

Militant Islamic fundamentalism, for one. This came out a story about the book "The Hawk and the Dove", which ran in the NY Times last Saturday. Paul Nitze's grandson, Nicholas Thompson, wrote the book, which looks at the Cold War, his grandfather, and George Kennan.

This is why: Thompson was able to gain quite a bit of access to retired Soviet officials because of who his grandfather was. As the article relates, Nitze had a hand in the failure of the Senate to ratify the SALT II treaty.

Nitze orchestrated the leak of misleading information about Soviet soldiers in Cuba at a critical moment in the debate over an agreement that Mr. Warnke negotiated. The Senate failed to approve the treaty, known as SALT II. ... Thirty years later, Gen. Nikolai Detinov, one of the Soviet arms negotiators, told Mr. Thompson that the failure to ratify SALT II in the summer of 1979 hardened the Kremlin’s position; if it had been approved, the general said, “we would not have gone into Afghanistan.”

No Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, no jihad sponsored by the Saudis and the CIA and bin Ladin would have probably stayed home to run his father's construction company. So we have Paul Nitze to thank, in no small measure, for the creation of al Qaeda.

Not to mention that Nitze and his fellow hawks almost set the stage for the destruction of human civilization:

Nitze’s idea that the United States could fight and win a limited nuclear war was a chimera; the Soviets always planned a full-out response if attacked.

We are very lucky that Nitze's idea to provoke a Soviet attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis was not put into action. The Soviet Union was going to fail, sooner or later. They were spending an unsustainable amount of their GDP on their military. That was understood as far back as 1960. The collapse was inevitable; the right wing fiction that "Reagan won the Cold War" has been and always will be the pipe dream of a conservative ideology that has proven to be as bankrupt as Communism.