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So you think it was the Spy agencies that "won" the cold war? I encourage you to read this article on Stratfor: http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyran

So you think it was the Spy agencies that "won" the cold war? I encourage you to read this article on Stratfor: http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2012/02/dr-brenner-on-stratfor.html http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2012/02/d... "Stratfor is a sleazy outfit. It was established as a money machine by George Friedman and a former Texas Congressman (now out of the picture) who served at one time on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His being the co-founder along with the presence in the vicinity of numerous retired military people and civilian officials helps explain the selection of Austin as the company’s home. They hustle; everything they do smacks of a hustle. They exploit the student interns while playing on their desire to partake of the mysterious and the romantic. Those they do hire for regular positions get the skimpiest of wages. Expertise and languages are little valued. Their hallmark tool is an electronic pair of scissors. One student had spent four years as an interrogator for the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served as an employee of a contract firm there. His first assignment as a junior member of the Stratfor team was to prowl around the Rio Grande Valley looking for stuff on the drug cartels; he never had been there before. Stratfor cultivates a mystique of secrecy and insider intelligence because in fact they have little to sell that is exceptional. They use open sources and communicate with old pals in and around government to get a feel for what’s going on. The Wikileaks material corroborates this, and it provides the further insight that they pay people for information and/or contacts. Those people include journalists, politicos, the occasional academic and professional tattlers. Sources and clients seem to overlap, i.e. Stratfor plays both ends against the middle. Having been shown a couple of Stratfor reports, I am singularly unimpressed by the supposedly inside information and the quality of the analysis." Stratfor is just another K-street style retirement house and military industrial money milking machine. There's no evidence they produce any more value than say, Foreign Intelligence magazine. They just charge more for it and claim special abilities no one has seen (and have often been hilariously wrong) Basically the military "intelligence" version of a Gartner Group report. The Soviet Union primarily collapsed because it was a poorly run system. Hell, if you believe the libertarian/Austrians it was practically inevitable it was going to crash. The story that Saint Reagan ran them into an arms race which bankrupted them, or spy agencies toppled them is a form of massive survivorship bias. You could claim that external events could set a match to fuel that's already there, but the basic weaknesses that put it teetering on collapse were internal economic and political issues that were wholly self made. If one day North Korea collapses, are you going to claim spy agencies get the credit, or that the basic economic and political system is not sustainable in the long term.

xnull2guest 12y ago
I want to be straightforward here because I respect you: I don't find this line of discussion very interesting and it's unlikely you'll get much substantive conversation back from me, though I may try. Mostly this is because I think this entire branch of conversation, as interesting it could otherwise be, seems orthogonal to the point and the claim. I don't want to get too far from the main claim and the discussions from the grandparents. I would not argue that intelligence operations 'ended' the cold war - nor that it was just intelligence that won it. They had an important role in winning the war - by that I mean the cold war was an intelligence war as much as a diplomacy war and an arms war and a proxy war. It's like saying that the intelligence services had a role to play winning WWII. They did. The war wasn't won solely by intelligence. In any case, as you can tell, not an interesting conversation or point - it's mundane. Factoring out whether someone thinks that Stratfor actually provides something of value to the US government or is mostly a place to couch retired generals who have too many secrets to let loose into the private sector it stands that independent of Stratfor, CANVAS was involved in starting colored revolutions and is today involved in trying to kindle revolution in Venezuela - in those same links for example are documents from 2012 providing analysis about how to do that that reflect very accurately the mobilization and activities happening today (getting students to protest, support for Leopoldo, etc). What's more, there's far more than CANVAS that the US government uses to accomplish these things. So if you'll allow me to exit what I'd like to leave while bowing out is that Stratfor's record of efficiency doesn't matter so much - we're only barely talking about Stratfor.

xnull2guest 12y ago

I want to be straightforward here because I respect you: I don't find this line of discussion very interesting and it's unlikely you'll get much substantive conversation back from me, though I may try. Mostly this is because I think this entire branch of conversation, as interesting it could otherwise be, seems orthogonal to the point and the claim. I don't want to get too far from the main claim and the discussions from the grandparents. I would not argue that intelligence operations 'ended' the cold war - nor that it was just intelligence that won it. They had an important role in winning the war - by that I mean the cold war was an intelligence war as much as a diplomacy war and an arms war and a proxy war. It's like saying that the intelligence services had a role to play winning WWII. They did. The war wasn't won solely by intelligence. In any case, as you can tell, not an interesting conversation or point - it's mundane. Factoring out whether someone thinks that Stratfor actually provides something of value to the US government or is mostly a place to couch retired generals who have too many secrets to let loose into the private sector it stands that independent of Stratfor, CANVAS was involved in starting colored revolutions and is today involved in trying to kindle revolution in Venezuela - in those same links for example are documents from 2012 providing analysis about how to do that that reflect very accurately the mobilization and activities happening today (getting students to protest, support for Leopoldo, etc). What's more, there's far more than CANVAS that the US government uses to accomplish these things. So if you'll allow me to exit what I'd like to leave while bowing out is that Stratfor's record of efficiency doesn't matter so much - we're only barely talking about Stratfor.