KGB chess in Venezuela?

Austin Bay discusses in Instapundit.

John Kerry thinks it would be a swell idea to get Russia more involved in the Middle East

Jim Geraghty writes at National Review about a period of time when

...back when red lines really meant something. It’s fascinating to think that back in 1983, the United States ran nuclear first-strike simulations that began with Moscow increasing its military role in the Middle East, arming Syria, and so on.

...Now the administration is trying to get Moscow to take a bigger role in the Middle East. Really. Josh Rogin and Eli Lake report:

...The State Department is now quietly encouraging U.S. allies to engage with Moscow, as part of Secretary John Kerry’s quest to win Russian support for a political process in Syria.

Why, it’s almost as if Obama and Kerry either don’t know or don’t care that the Russian KGB was the incubator of all sorts of terrorist groups, from the Red Brigades to the Red Army Faction to the Palestine Liberation Organization, not to mention its giving assistance to Libya’s terrorist allies. When the KGB was operating at peak power around the world, anti-Western terrorism thrived.

And now Obama and Kerry are encouraging the Middle East to turn to a man who has been in the KGB for 40 years and was considered particularly ruthless by his peers. (You’re a fool if you think a KGB man ever really leaves.)

Read more here.

Spreading lies and manipulating events

Jonah Goldberg writes: Lots of people have noted that Vladimir Putin is using the KGB playbook in his effort to carve up Ukraine. That involves not only lying, but manipulating events in such a way so as to make it easier for others to believe the lies. Soviet propaganda still contaminates, while nuclear fallout does not. Lies about America, the West, and the nature of democratic capitalism live on throughout the third world and in radioactive pockets on American campuses.

The Soviet effort to foster wars of national liberation, to poison the minds of the “Bandung Generation,” to deracinate cultures from their own indigenous building blocks of democracy, to destroy non-Marxist competitors interested in reform, to create evil and despotic regimes that are seen as “authentic” because they represent the “true will” of their subjugated and beaten down peoples: these seem to me to amount to the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. Not least because it was those sorts of efforts that gave birth to North Korea in the first place.
Please read more here.