(Not to transform this crucial but irrelevant to the topic at hand sub-point into a sub-thread, but..,)

[ACTUALLY, yes, the Russian GOVERNMENT was at one time our mortal enemy, in that, they represented a diametric opposite to our own ideas of how the machinations of "free" government and commerce should function.

There's a old saying that Russia is a land of many ruled by a few. That's b/c it was a feudalistic society who's ties to lineage and power date back centuries if not longer. If the oligarchs, land barons and tycoons of Russian's infrastructure had it's way in East Asia then half of the world would pretty much be ruled by a highly concentrated conglomeration, comprised of the "winners" of the Capitalist game in Asia, a competition which actually went into GAME OVER mode about 5 centuries ago. Instead, we stopped the "Communist" push in East Asia, which weakened the enemy, thus enabling their own ppl to end the centuries old reign of Feudal ties (somewhat figuratively speaking, that is).

Let's not forget that Stalin and his goons managed to somehow, someway, murder about THREE times the number of ppl that Hitler did. The same regime that trained Dogs with explosives strapped on them to run under German tanks ya, that's a true story...

And I'm by no means trying to be a xenophobe here, but parts of the world were living in the medieval days about 50 yrs ago, as a few are still today. I mean, we all rip on the U.S b/c it's our right to. We watch Stephen Colbert and use George Bush toilet paper b/c it's healthy tribal behavior. But if our "mortal enemy" had their post-WWII vision implanted as opposed to the Western ideal, you can be sure the world today would be a starkly different place
and I'll conjecturize here and say we would probably all be picking root-vegetables like our comrades. Basically, there would be a virtually infinite number of Russian principalities with populations of about 2,000 (perhaps 200) citizens, with nuclear weapon capability, who would constitute a large portion of the world's superpowers, and this is not favorable to anyone.

Watch FFC's Patton again, man. Patton was right-on, we shouldn't have stopped before we got to Berlin, we should have rolled right on into Moscow and finished the war there.*

If we had, it's quite plausible that there would never have been the East Asian wars (Nam, etc), no 'floating' Russian nuclear war heads today that might fall into the hands of someone bent on destroying U.S cities, as well as no Russian war in Afghanistan and thus...no C.I.A trained and armed Al-Queda carrying out 9-11. I've heard several comedians including Bill Maher use that line of thought in one of their bits, it's alarmingly funny b/c it's so frighteningly true.


*= And we could have in fact quite 'conquered' them, not in the Russian or German sense of the word mind you, but just the same as we would have all been drinking vodka (owned by Germans) if the Nazis had won WWII, Russia would have been James Dean watching, McDonalds eating, 57 Chevy driving, surfing..(well, no surfing in Russia, aww), Rock n Roll listening, day-trading capitalist bastards like us but about 50 yrs earlier if we had the same conquering spirit of those darned Cossacks.]