@L3,
Wealth is transferred by theft. Which is my argument regarding those who stole it from the original investors in energy production and have since used it to fund further destabilization in the West.

What we have here is not a 5 year episode that can be blamed on Bush because he stirred up a peaceful picturesque backwater. Now to be clear I do not think that we are the victims of a tightly organized conspiracy that was hatched in the Lubyanka. I belief that in their dreams Comrades Beria et al hoped for this and did what they could to lay groundwork for it but this can not be simply ascribed to them anymore than it could be ascribed to the plots dreamed of by Larouche. The efforts of our enemies were like the beating of butterflies’ wings in the winds of history.

What we do have is the culmination of a process that has always been reversible and the affects of which have been accumulating for decades. We tolerated the poison for reasons that seemed prudent at the time and kicked many a can down the road, because we did not want to give cover to an effort by a Demagogue later to restrict civil liberties or because we assumed that the natural superiority of our system would be evident and that the market of ideas, like the markets in capital goods or services, would validate our trust. We forgot that even free markets need to be guarded against fraud and theft. We forgot that the enemies of freedom will feel no urge to respond to restraint in kind and that would instead seek ever more ways to control and restrict speech.