¦ Intelligence, ambition, business sense, or all three? In what ways did Bill Gates's triumph parallel Andrew Carnegie's a century earlier?
¦ What was the main prerequisite for Gates's triumph?
1Earlier in the Iran-Iraq war, when Iran appeared on the verge of defeating Iraq, Reagan had provided $500 million a year in credits to allow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to buy armaments. If either Iran or Iraq won decisively, it could control the flow of Middle Eastern oil. The United States therefore preferred a stalemate.
Mujahideen in Afghanistan stand on top of a Soviet helicopter they shot down with U. S.-supplied Stinger missiles in the early 1980s.
Anastasio Somoza. Because the victorious Sandinista government was supported by both Cuba and the Soviet Union, Reagan was determined to force it from power. He backed anti-Sandinista elements in Nicaragua known as the Contras and in 1981 persuaded Congress to provide these “freedom fighters” with arms.
But the Contras made little progress, and many Americans feared that aiding them would lead, as it had in Vietnam, to the use of American troops in the fighting. In October 1984 Congress banned further military aid to the Contra rebels. Reagan then sought to persuade other countries and private American groups to help the Contras (as he put it) keep “body and soul together.”
Marine Colonel Oliver North, an aide of Reagan’s national security adviser, devised a scheme to indirectly funnel federal money to the Contras. He inflated the price of U. S. weapons, sold them to Iran1, and secretly transferred the profits to the Contras. This plainly violated the congressional ban on such aid.
When North’s stratagem came to light in November 1986, he was fired from his job with the security council. Reagan insisted that he knew nothing about the aid to the Contras. Critics pointed out that if he was telling the truth it was almost as bad since that meant that he had not been able to control his own administration.
Meanwhile, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 enraged Charles Wilson, a Democratic congressman from Texas. (Wilson, a womanizer, heavy drinker, and alleged cocaine-user, was played by Tom Hanks in the movie, Charlie Wilson’s War [2007]). Wilson persuaded his colleagues to allocate money for the mujahideen, Muslim warriors who were trying to drive the Soviets out of their country. Within several years the Afghan tribes, especially Islamist radicals known as the Taliban, were covertly receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons. Stinger missiles, which could be moved on mules, proved especially effective at shooting down Soviet helicopters. Provisioned with American weapons, Muslim insurgents ambushed Convoys, mined roads, and engaged in various acts of terrorism. Soviet casualties increased, as did the cost of the war. Opposition mounted to communist leaders in the Soviet Union. Soviet generals began referring to the war in Afghanistan as “our Vietnam.” In 1989 the Soviets pulled out; in 1996 the Taliban took over Afghanistan and instituted a radical Islamic state.
•••-[Read the Document Reagan, Support for the Contras (1984) at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
