Life of Steve continued

    Steve remained a communist but the world was changing
    In the same year of 1979 when the new pope visited Poland, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. This act seemed to reignite the Cold War. U.S. President Jimmy Carter tried to bring back the military draft, but he failed here.
   Still his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski kept pushing U.S. foreign policy into a confrontation with the Soviet Union. He visited the Persian Gulf, pointed for the t.v. cameras and said, "There is the arc of crisis." He was referrring to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran.
    In 1979 in Iran, a revolution led by the Islamic cleric Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah. In Saudi Arabia in the same year, a group of zealots, perhaps inspired by the Iranian revolution, siezed part of the holy city of Mecca. Later these insurgents were captured and killed. Meanwhile Iranian revolutionaries took hostages from the American Embassy in Tehran, and held them until Ronald Reagan became  U.S. president.
    The U.S. government helped fund guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, one of whose leaders was Osama Bin Laden. The Soviet army tried to crush the guerrillas and a brutal war broke out. The Soviet troops died by the thousands while killing more than half a million Afghanis. Steve looks back at the Soviet invasion to-day and says, "It was a great mistake." Certainly it helped destroy the Soviet Union.
    To compound Soviet troubles, the new Reagan government in the U.S., upped its massive military budget with more new and frightening weapons. Reagan unveiled  a new weapon system called 'Star Wars'. It would bring peace , Reagan assured the world, by shooting down incoming rockets going towards the U.S.
   The ageing Soviet leaders saw correctly that Star Wars was aimed at them, or at least would shoot down any incoming Soviet rockets if a nuclear war broke out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the Soviets's ailing economy couldn't match anything like Star Wars. The new information technologies springing up in  the U.S. and western Europe left the Soviet economy far behind.
    "The weight of the social subsidies for ordinary citizens," writes Jim Laxer, "plus the cost of keeping top Communists well outfitted, as well as a vast military were too much for the communist's inefficient economy to bear."

                          To Be Continued