Columns

 

 

As he took his place in line waiting to make his purchase at a store one soviet said to the person in front of him,  “Comrade, what are you standing in line for?” to which this other soviet replied,  “I don’t know but I am going to buy it when I get to the front of the line.” 

 

Despite the years I never grow tired of my favorite joke told about daily life in the now defunct Soviet Union! Humor is often a mere reflection of the truth so having been on a study tour of the Soviet Union in December 1986 I can tell readers first hand that this joke did indeed reflect the result of centralized economic planning.  In 1986 I was young, brave, and perhaps a little stupid since trading on the black market in the Soviet Union was a crime so I broke the law every day I was in that broken empire. One trade encounter stands out from all the others because the person my roommate and I were bartering with was offering soviet military medals, busts of Lenin, and other propaganda pieces in pursuit of under wear – boxer shorts to be exact not briefs.   

 

The black market etiquette called for slipping your soviet customer past the security crew in your tourist-only hotel so that each trading party could display their items for trading across the hotel beds. This particular soviet asked for boxer shorts because in 1986 blue jeans and Western magazines were relatively easy to obtain but boxer shorts were simply not available to the average citizen no matter how many lines you spent your day waiting in at local stores.

 

Once this study tour of the Soviet Union ended I returned to undergraduate life at Iowa State University where I remember a foreign policy presentation in January 1987 -- perhaps with a few beers involved to spur the debate - to my fellow fraternity brothers where I stated, “sure the Soviet Union has a huge military and nuclear weapons but they have to buy underwear via the black market so the country is a paper tiger which will surely implode soon…………. “  

   

January 1987 is when I offered this geo-political analysis having seen the Soviet Union operate with my own eyes and then in 1991 Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a soviet tank waving the Russian national flag (not the hammer and sickle banner of the USSR) which was a symbolic nail in the USSR’s coffin. During the five years of 1986 to 1991 I remember the USA’s various intelligence/national security services constantly reminding us of the imminent soviet threat then in a short-lived last gasp military coup d’etat squelched by Yeltsin and average soviets yearning for an overhaul of their economy, government, and personal lives the Soviet Union dissolved. Then it was merely ten years later that the USA experienced September 11, 2001 – “9-11” – when our vast intelligence services infrastructure overlooked all the signs that fully-fueled passenger jets could be transformed into missiles guided by motivated, radical Islamist terrorists. We taxpayers have had to spend billions of dollars feeding this intelligence network for the 50 years of the Cold War and for the last 9 years on the War on Terror but at some point we have to question – is all of this spending necessary and is there a better way to accomplish the national security objectives?

 

My thanks for this column’s theme goes to Minnesota’s Star Tribune newspaper (www.startribune.com) which has published a series of articles in the last week entitled, “Top Secret America.” This series of articles re-published via the Washington Post noted that since 9-11 our federal government now has 67 counterterrorism command centers including entities such as – National Gang Intelligence Center, Secure Flight Service Center, and several others.  Perhaps the most telling insight regarding how vast the military/intelligence spending is in our country is this quote from US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in this series of articles:

 

“This is a terrible confession. I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the office of the Secretary of Defense.”