re: #51 Destro
I did not say that Iran was not involved. I said that whoever was involved that did this they may have used local resources long cultivated from the Balkan wars that continue till this day in one way or another. The terrorists could bring explosives in Iranian diplomatic pouches but that has risks and they want to deny involvement so I assume they have to buy explosives locally? Also they need contacts to hide them and help the case the potential victims and crime scene.
Some people took offense that I also placed blame on a karmic level on the American CIA/State Dept that allied itself to these Islamist terrorists and in fact has been doing so on and off world wide since the 1980s. Americans don’t want to hear they are complicit in deaths destructions around the world through policies that had unintended consequences.
I can handle that. Back in the 80s, I opposed US assistance to the Afghan mujahadeen. This was an unpopular position, since I was at the time a serving officer of the US Army. My reasons included a distrust of the Afghan opposition and its hard-core Islamist supporters in such places as Saudi Arabia, and a barely thinkable suspicion that the Soviets might actually be in the right to some extent. Afghan modernists had allied themselves with the communist world because that seemed the best chance they had at the time for bringing their country into the modern world. It was a pact with the devil, of course, but if they had won the war and survived, they might still be there, their reforms might still be in effect, and their communists allies would still be long gone.
As it was, the communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan actually out-lasted the Soviet Union itself by a few months. It could have survived longer by shedding the vestiges of Marxism and appealing to the west for aid, but such a thing was not possible. The west had long since allied itself with the forces who sought to destroy any form of modernism, communist or otherwise.
It should be no surprise that Muslim extremists turned their sights on the west as soon as the Soviets were out of Afghanistan. Some of them, the Iranian mullahs in particular, didn’t wait that long. The Iran Hostage crisis started around the same time as large-scale Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, actually a few weeks earlier. There were some differences between the mullahs and the Afghan opposition, but there were also some striking similarities. I was amazed that almost noone could see those similarities.
We opposed the Afghan intervention just to kill some Russkies and cause the Soviets some headaches. In the process, we did indeed help unleash a wild and dangerous force, one that is still loose in the world. As always we are not the only actors on the world stage and we are not responsible for all the evil consequences that flow from great events. We are responsible for some of them, though, and some relatively simple historical perspective could prevent a lot of that.