Forward into the Past: Proxy Wars and American Security

By Ali Hassan Massoud

All throughout the Cold War years the Western democracies were tweaked, poked, prodded, slammed, and bled of both treasure and blood. But not by our nominal enemies however. Except for the Korea War (1950-1953) The US, UK, France and the rest of NATO never fought the Soviet Union or People's Republic of China directly.

No, the Communist nations were smarter. What they would do is fight the West by proxy. They'd give militant nationalist and separatist groups funds, training, arms, and political and moral support where and when it suited their goals.

This was considered very clever (diabolical even) by the foreign policy types because it caused the US and the rest of the West to have to garrison troops and build naval and air bases all over the world to fight these insurgencies, guerilla wars, and terror campaigns, and at very little cost to themselves but at great political and monetary cost to their actual targets in the West.

The only time this war by proxy nearly blew up in the Soviets face was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Even though historians say the Kennedy Administration "won" that one, this conclusion is dubious at best. Consider this: The Soviets had to remove their nuclear missile sites from Cuba, which given that this was never really verified or even verifiable, and given that the Soviets possessed ICBMs and missile equipped submarines, where is the victory?

The Soviets on the other hand got an agreement from the US to halt any further military operations against Cuba and an end to support for anti-Communist guerilla groups based in the US. So in return for stopping construction of missile bases, they received a permanent pledge from the US to leave the Cuban Communist government alone. And so Cuba acted as a permanent and untouchable Soviet intelligence and staging area strategically located off the coast of the Florida.

The Cubans raised hell all throughout the subsequent years. Cuba sent troops to Angola to and Namibia in Africa which insured victory for pro-Soviet liberation movements in both countries and subsequent pro-Soviet states. The only real military opposition the US faced when it invaded Grenada in 1983 was from Cuban military engineers there to build an airport.

Cuba was a scourge to the West in general and the US in particular and all at the behest of the Soviet Union who bankrolled the Cuban state. However what really seems to have stuck in the craw of the US policy makers was the proxy nature of it all. While they all knew for a fact that Cuba's mischief making was Soviet sponsored, the Soviets could and did always back away from any direct responsibility for what the sovereign state of Cuba did.

The US tried a new tack to play this war by proxy strategy itself during the Reagan Administration by sponsoring their own proxy warriors. The CIA sponsored resistance groups of their own in the quasi-Marxist state of Nicaragua, and sponsored it's own front groups in the guerilla wars in El Salvador and Soviet occupied Afghanistan.

That Anti-Soviet guerilla opposition in Afghanistan is what latter became known as al-Qaida. We know how they turned out, eh? Like this actually.

"Those guys", says Ward Nerd columnist Gary Brecher, "had got used to blowing things up in the name of Allah and didn't feel like quitting just because the Russians went home. They went back to their native slums all over the world and started making no end of trouble. It was Afghan Mujahideen vets who taught the Somalis how easy it was to bring down a chopper, even one as well armored as the Blackhawk, by firing RPGs at the tail rotor. It's Afghan vets who form most of the effective Al Qaeda cells around today."

The sad thing for me at least is the verisimilitude that Brecher's words have. A policy of continually involving the nation into the affairs of other societies in order to thwart their political, economic, and social development is in the end destructive, both to America and to the disrupted societies. The blowback phenomenon is also a negative result of proxy war. Where do the warriors go when their war ends? Some look for new wars.

In this age of global terrorism it seems that the denizens of America's Empire are now striking back in kind. The only moral and practical recourse for America is to cut loose of the military bases, political interference, and outright occupation and warfare that the US has engaged in throughout the post Cold War era and that began in earnest with the 1992 deployment in Somalia.

Free trade, the avoidance of entangling military treaties, and refusing involvement in the affairs of other nations was America's foreign policy from 1789 until 1916. I for one think a foreign policy of political neutrality, free and fair trade is the heritage of Americans and we should go back to our roots. This is both morally and practically preferable to what the Bush Administration and it's Neo-Conservative advisors are doing. The sooner the better too.

Ali Hassan Massoud is a father, political theorist, apostate Muslim, small business owner, compulsive blogger, college graduate, crack rifle marksman, cat lover, shrewd investor, US Army veteran, and currently single. He lives in Michigan.