From: "Phil Payne" 

> In fact, for the benefit of those who believe that Reagan's sturdy
> foreign/military policy drove the collapse of the USSR, I'll grant
> that little "ghost war" sideshow delivered a lot more bang/buck than
> SDI or Pershing missiles in Europe or the 600-ship Navy plan --
> because the long slog of a nasty unwinnable war discredited Soviet
> rule at home more widely and deeply than grand strategy gambits.

I'm sure Reagan's policies helped, but they cannot be accounted
"responsible" for the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It
underperformed as an economic entity right from the start.  We saw what it
_could_ achieve if motivated in the Soviet Union's defeat of Germany, but
the rest was cock-up after cock-up.  Dedicating most of the fertile bits of
Central Asia to growing cotton on the assumption you could sell a million
tons of low-grade cotton at the same per ton as ten thousand tons of
high-grade American cotton - and totally wrecking the infrastructure in the
process.  The Aral will never recover.

Things like that started long, long before Reagan.  The economic inertia of
the Soviet Union is almost incomprehensible.  Reagan was perhaps the first
Western politician to negotiate the oriental (non-Aristotlean) way -
"one of these two things is GOING to happen, and you can choose
which".

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5