There is a scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in which Luke Skywalker fights Darth Vader in some sort of dark vision. He lasers Vader’s head off, but when the head lands, the mask disappears and it is Luke’s face under the mask.
Friday night, I was expressing to a friend that it seemed to me that the United States was becoming the Soviet Union… After all, not only has the U.S. gov’t invaded a Muslim Republic, claimed it was freeing the people and then faced resistance from them, but it’s not even a different country. Just like the Soviet Union, we are occupying Afghanistan. What a give-away. That friend directs my attention to Will We Look Like the Soviets When We Leave Iraq? by Marc Kaufman in the Washington Post.
Kaufman writes, “While not much discussed in public, these parallels between the American and Soviet occupations have clearly been on the minds of some policymakers.” Maybe the Soviet Union won the Cold War after all.
6:04 pm on September 8, 2003
