Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market

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Four years ago, the government of the French Republic took the lead in refusing to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The French, who had taken a very active and successful part in the first Iraq war, simply did not think that an invasion followed by the occupation of an Arab country was a good idea. That was their prerogative (see

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[fpb]

So you think that the Soviet Union would not have collapsed without the Afghanistan war? I disagree. And as for the resources of many third world countries being added to the Soviet Empire - they were. Are you old enough to remember the seventies? I am. The whole third world, except for a few Latin American military dictatorship, was in the Soviet Union's pockets. The West was besieged, under attack by terrorists from the inside and by economic warfare from the outside (the deliberate use of oil as a weapon). Inflation was up to 25% in some countries, unemployment in the tens of millions. And then, one day, the besieged citadel woke and found that there were no besiegers any more; that the Soviet Union was looking for deals, that the third world could no longer support the burden of their own debt, that the oil bloc could not keep up its artificial price in the face of their own internal hatreds - Saudi Arabia vs. Iraq vs. Iran - and that the Soviet Union was quite willing to underprice them anyway. Do you know what defeated the Soviet Union? Afghanistan? Don't be ridiculous: that was a footling affair that any Russian government could have kept going for ever. What defeated them was that immense Mother Russia, with the broadest and most fertile arable lands in the world, was having to import grain from Canada and the US. That the cars in its streets were cheap knock-offs of outdated Fiat models produced under licence. That most families lived in two-rooms prefabricated flats. That people had to queue for hours to buy bread, while food supplies rotted in railway sidings for lack of organization. That the ships of the mighty Soviet navy had engines that had to be started by chucking a lighted match into a pilot flame. That is what put an end to the Soviet Union: it had become economically dependent on the West. As had all its other enemies. And so, one day, the citizens of the besieged citadels walked out and started taking care of the affairs of their enemies. It was wealth that did it, my friend, the accumulation of capital in Tokyo and New York, in London and Paris and Frankfurt; capital without which the rest of the world could no longer live. And that capital accumulated there and nowhere else - in West Berlin and not in East Berlin - because the one society was free and the other was not. Freedom, political freedom, was the ultimate power on the victorious side. Afghanistan only showed that the Soviets were too tired to fight it any more - Stalin, or any Tsar, would have disposed of the nuisance in five years flat. It also, incidentally, allowed some Americans a certain amount of pleasing revenge for the similar Hell cooked up for them by the Soviets a few years earlier in Vietnam. But as for having any ultimate meaning, any war would have done as well - or no war at all.