"Declassified Study" - How the Soviet Menace Was Hyped-"Constant Exaggeration" (Sound Familiar?)

[kpete]

How the Soviet Menace Was Hyped

By Melvin A. Goodman
September 15, 2009

Editor’s Note: To understand what happened to the United States over the past three decades, a good place to start is by examining the battles fought within the CIA’s analytical division over evidence of Soviet capabilities and intentions, which were systematically hyped by Cold War hardliners.

By exaggerating the Soviet menace, these hardliners manipulated the American people into allowing vast sums of taxpayers’ money to flow into the military-industrial complex. But a newly released U.S. document demonstrates how badly the intelligence was distorted, as former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman writes in this guest essay:

A recently declassified study on Soviet intentions during the Cold War identifies significant failures in U.S. intelligence analysis on Soviet military intentions and demonstrates the constant exaggeration of the Soviet threat.

The study, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb285/index.htm which was released last week by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, was prepared by a Pentagon contractor in 1995 who had access to former senior Soviet defense officials, military officers and industrial specialists.

It demonstrates the consistent U.S. exaggeration of Soviet “aggressiveness” and the failure to recognize Soviet fears of a U.S. first strike. The study begs serious questions about current U.S. exaggeration of “threats” emanating from Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.

much more:
http://consortiumnews.com/2009/091509b.html

[hobbit709]

1. It's the same crowd wanting these results

so of course they're going to exaggerate it. How else could the military-industrial complex keep making their obscene profits.

[Echo In Light]

2. Hey, it was worth building thousands upon thousands of extinction ensuring weaponry

[TxRider]

3. This is very old news

All this was realized and exposed shortly after the USSR breakup.

[Octafish]

13. So why do we still have two wars going on nobody wants?

Could it be the same military-industrial complex ownership is making money off of war?

Learn more:

It's Time to Bench "Team B"

[TxRider]

14. Of course it is making money

It's common knowledge.

The better question is why isn't democratic party in charge getting us out of them.

[Octafish]

17. Scoop Jackson

Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson was a son of the military industrial complex, a good Democrat and a liberal and a hawk. Advancing the cause of strategic bombing adn missiles, both builty by his states's Boeing, the former senator also the mentor to many of today's neocon warmongers. The great DUer Dover started an excellent thread on the subject:

Perle, Wolfowitz and........Scoop Jackson?!

Disagree about this being common knowledge. Most Americans know more about Jon and Kate than they do Team B or PNAC.

As to the reason the Democrats don't stop the war, your guess is as good as mine.

[Canuckistanian]

15. Wow, amazing article

GHW Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. The unholy triumvirate for over 30 years.

[pipi_k]

4. As a child of the 1950s I am really really pissed off

Because, growing up, that's all we ever heard.

The "Soviet Threat"

It was there every single day. Air raid drills. Duck and cover exercises. Weekly testing of those damned (newer and louder) air raid sirens that used to make my blood run cold and leave me shaken for a long time afterward. Bomb shelters being built in backyards all over the place.

those fuckers terrorized a whole generation of schoolchildren, and it took me a long time to get over the fear that we would be bombed to Kingdom Come by the Evil Soviets, probably as we slept in our beds. I suffered from insomnia for years because of that.

Oh, and can I just mention "Readers Digest"... nearly every issue, for years, included an article about the Evil USSR.

Anyone who doesn't think our own government are terrorists really has not been paying attention for the last 45+ years.

[HughBeaumont]

8. Ditto for the 80s.

How many damn times did I have to hear the nutjob Reagone administration (Reagan himself was a Revelation/Armageddon-believin' fundie) ramp up the "Reds are gonna push the button ANY DAY NOW" ruse and scare the crap out of everyone under 35? One of our HS commencement addresses touched on the "fear of nuclear war". Then there was The Day After. Red Dawn. War Games.

Who NEEDS that? Growing up in a redneck small town is hard enough, I had to worry about THAT also?

[TxRider]

18. I remember that

The bomb shelters are still visible in some people's yards.

I was a bit too young during the cuban missile crisis for it to scare me though, and I always thought the duck and cover drills were a joke. I never feared it at all really.

But yeah we're just now really coming out from under the last effects of that era I think, certainly folks like GHB, Rumsfeld and Cheney picked up the torch for the vietnam era folks like McNamara and were definitely a product of those times.

It's finally winding itself now I hope. But with China on the rise who knows what they can rationalize.

[Hannah Bell]

23. it seems so surrealistic now, doesn't it?

[HughBeaumont]

5. "Fear Works" - Jim McDermott, "Fahrenheit 9/11"

The Reagan Democrat leftovers will NEVER let go of TEH RED MENACE. EVER. What's even worse is that these idiots wouldn't know a Communist from a Socialist from a Fascist from a Heaven's Gate cultist.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. The politicians' and Pentagon's best allies are scary bogeymen. K&R

[RufusTFirefly]

7. The "menace" is always exaggerated

Whether it's terra or the Soviet threat, there's always a modicum of truth to it but then the elites who want to maintain their stranglehold on power, property, and the people use it as a blunt instrument to beat us all into submission. It's the same story, again and again. The phantoms change but the true enemies remain remarkably consistent.

[Octafish]

9. Team B -- Pentagon Warlord Robert Gates headed the operation for Poppy Bush

Your War Party at Work.

CIA Team B

Know your BFEE: Robert Gates did more than keep the doors open at BCCI

[FormerDittoHead]

10. But we must NEVER cut military spending! It's the one part of the economy that ALWAYS grows!

:sarcasm:

I never understood why, as a country with oceans on both sides and allies on our borders, we had to spend so much on the military.

We spent all of that money to prepare for a nuke attack, yet we couldn't even stop 11 hijackers with box cutters.

At least the Egyptians have the pyramids left over to show for their wasted efforts.

added the :sarcasm tag for those who might not "get it".

[LynnTheDem]

11. Geez, that's been the US MO for decades.

What I find amazing is how so many Americans fall for the same old bullshit again and again and again and again and again...

"...it is always a simple matter to drag the people along ... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

Sound familiar? It bloody should.

[Blue_Tires]

25. +1

[alfredo]

12. We knew back in the sixties that the USSR was going to implode.

All we needed to do is keep doing what we were doing and their economy was going to collapse.


The Soviets ignored infrastructure, and common industry in favor of military spending. Without that infrastructure and a strong industrial base, they couldn't compete.

We really didn't need Reagan to push the Soviets, they were on their way out. They were working on an orderly transition. Advisors from the US and other western nations were helping them. Reagan's ego forced a quick dissolution that caused the chaos that followed. Russia suffered under the neo con Yeltsin because Reagan's ego demanded they fall on his watch.

[slampoet]

16. Like how the drug war was hyped? Missing children hyped? internet preditors hyped? Terrorists hyped?

Juvenile delinquents hyped? missile gap hyped? video game dangers hyped? obesity hyped? Meth hyped?

[MisterP]

19. ah, the Red Menace: they were aggressive, lied, invented atrocity reports,

and were the epitome of everything Orwellian
thing is, the patch of land from the Bug to Okhotsk sort of ceased that mentality after, I dunno, 1954; its main international troubles were, well, supporting national liberation movements
thing is, huge chunks of the CIA, Pentagon, and State never stopped thinking that they were fighting a ruthless Stalinist enemy at home and abroad, who would do and say anything to subvert our clean 50s divine commonwealth of Libria; so they inflated the Soviet "threat," bribed the postwar French, Italian, and Japanese elections, and overthrew governments because, well, They lied and fought our pet dictatorships. Whenever a Pacepa or Mitrokhin came to tell them what they wanted to hear, they were ready and willing to be fooled
and so it went, in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Guyana, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Zaire, Uganda, Malawi, Angola, White Rhodesia, Namibia, Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Laos, Taiwan, South Korea...
and when the local lefties phoned Prague or Moscow for something to keep the landlords, race-war mercs, or Jesuit-butchers at bay, all hell broke loose

now they tell us that the bad Muslims are ruthless, have no respect for civilian life, hate all that is good and decent and tolerant and Western, lie, cheat, and steal
and, for those reasons, we have to ruthlessly kill them and the civilians around them, erase everything good and decent and tolerant in the West, and lie, cheat, and steal to "git 'im"

[anonymous171]

20. Meh at least we won in the end. Soviets were scum.

The way many well meaning liberals here in the states sympathized with them still makes me laugh though.

[espiral]

22. Laugh away, pal.

I stand a proud Marxist; and if anything, the absolute failure that is neoliberalism in the 21st Century is doing little to threaten that. Quite the opposite, in fact- the US and Europe are doing a great job proving me right.

[Oak2004]

21. No kidding

That became obvious to me during a trip to the USSR in the early 1970s. The country was, literally, crumbling: even one of the hotel facades in Leningrad was covered in netting to catch the bricks as the building slowly disintegrated. I didn't see a superpower in front of my eyes. I saw a new Potemkin village whose facade concealed a third world nation where almost nothing worked (or worked well).

A decade or two later I met a retired Russian instructor who had also been to the USSR, in the 1950's. The myth of Breshnev era stagnation notwithstanding, he described the country he saw in the same terms, and he too returned from his trip convinced the Cold War was largely a sham.

Bin Ladin got lucky on 9/11, and the buildings fell. The chances that terrorists will get that lucky in the future are low, and if we mind our own business the chance that terrorists will target us is very low. Iran is no threat to us. Neither in Venezuela, Cuba, or whatever flyspeck on the map will be hyped as the next great enemy.

[surrealAmerican]

24. While that is true, it should not be forgotten ...

... that the Soviets worked very hard to maintain the illusion that they were far more powerful than they really were. Had they not, the CIA would not have been able to get away with this.