Something I repeatedly observed while traveling in Eastern Europe was that Communism destroyed a culture’s basic integrity. People trapped in the Soviet block simply knuckled under and refused to buck the system. The whole society had become so corrupt that it was simply impossible to construct a viable opposition. What I failed to realize was the Soviet Empire would fail from the top-down. Gorbachev tried to repair a system that was so rotten that attempting to fix one thing only succeeded in breaking two other things. The chain reaction ultimately wrecked the whole system (we need to worry about this happening to us).

Isn’t this description (and its result) more applicable to the MIddle East than to America?

I’ve always thought we went into Iraq with a bottom-line goal of destabilizing the Middle East. It didn’t really make a whole lot of difference who won or lost there, just so the domino’s starting tipping over. I can’t tell, yet, if they are tipping but there do seem to be a whole lot more mightily unhappy people flailing around in their streets than there used to be.

(Can we pass a Constitutional amendment that every time a moonbat quotes “Mission Accomplished”, that that is sufficient reason to shoot him dead immediately on the spot and call it a crime passionale because it’s been overused, abused and misquoted with such sadistic glee for so long?)