Monday, November 27, 2006

KGB Kennedy

In running down the Iraq War, Ted Kennedy says it dishonors "the alliances that won ... the Cold War." And it is a common meme among liberals to say that the U.S. was "united" on foreign policy during the Cold War.

This is, of course, rubbish, as everyone my age or older knows or should know.¹ In the post-Vietnam era, liberals opposed doing everything specific, while pledging fealty in the abstract of course, to contain Soviet Communism and (as with the Islamist enemy today) made every manner of excuse, relativization, tu-quoque, trivialization, explanation, perspectivigitation, etc., for everything Communists did.

Kennedy has more to answer for than most (and I'm not referring to the fact that his 1980 presidential run was motivated in large part by the fear among liberal Dems that Jimmy Carter was too hawkish. Yes. Really.) But no, it's far worse ... Kennedy was an objective ally of the Soviet Union: as this article from former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, based on KGB files, makes perfectly explicit. A sitting member of the US Senate, according to the files, offered to help the Kremlin counter and undermine the foreign policy of the US president (the mad bomber Ronald Reagan and all the illiterate "egoist" hayseeds Jesusland). Kennedy's sanctimony (liberals' generally, too) about "the alliances that won ... the Cold War" might grate a little less on the ears if he himself (they themselves) hadn't been working to undermine those alliances at the time.

Dare we to hope, as someone wrote to me earlier this evening ... that Miss Ann Coulter will find this a suitable topic for Wednesday's column? I think we speak for many of Ann's admirers in saying that her writing seldom inspires so much joy as when she writes about the Chappaquiddick swim champ.
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¹ Lest I be accused of partisanship, I will also note that the conservatives and Republicans of the late 40s, as the inheritors of the isolationist tradition in the US, were not generally crazy about containment or the then-just-brewing "Cold War." The "bipartisan unity" of an anti-Communist foreign policy, in other words, was a feature of merely 15-20 years or so (1950-65/70, more or less), less than half the period of the Cold War (45 years ... 1946-91).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I read that NRO article too. Very depressing, and flatly appalling.

~derringdo