Who won the Cold War?

Editor,

U.S. claims to have "won" the Cold War are fundamental to the increasingly belligerent relations between the United States and Moslems around world.

Rivalry between the U.S. and the USSR reduced Moslems, as it did other regional and ethnic populations, to geostrategic pawns whose interests and aspirations were incidental to a bipolar political landscape. American capitalists blindly and arrogantly assumed that they had "defeated" communism, as evidenced by the demise of the USSR, and that the spoils of the Cold War -- invincibility and empire -- were theirs.

But nations that had been marginalized, manipulated, and dominated during the Cold War were not liberated -- their sovereignty and independence were not celebrated -- when the Cold War ended. Instead, they were perceived by American capitalists to have been absorbed into the orbit of the "sole remaining superpower."

This is probably why al Qaeda targeted the Pentagon and the World Trade Center -- to assert, unconstructively and viciously, that the nations of this planet do not constitute a capitalist empire run from Washington, DC, and New York City. Post-Cold War assumptions in the capitalist camp can easily be revised. Peace is possible, as are prosperity and the health of planet Earth.