You're welcome.
Whenever I see a mockingbird in flight, it looks to me like it has D-Day invasion stripes on its wings.
>cough<whatageek>cough<

The history of 20th Century Europe is my academic specialty. World War Two in Europe is my specialization. Being an irreverent smartass is my avocation.
But I couldn't think of a thing to improve upon this post. Well done, Doctor.

The first time we smoked hash (piece of cardboard, pin and glass for a pipe, we're old school) after my wife and I had moved overseas, I got real paranoid.

"Hey, we're in a foreign country breaking the law (Ireland, so not like we'd be whipped for it), what if somebody walks by our door and smells it?" (We lived on the top floor of a three story building by ourselves.)

My getting paranoid made my wife get paranoid, too. All the windows got opened. Ceiling fan turned on. Also the vent fan over the oven. Not good enough. So we piled as much furniture as we could against the door and retreated to the bathroom.

Good times.

Texas has a "Stand Your Ground" law and a law that effectively says if you're in fear for your life, you have the right to shoot the person(s) scaring you.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me those laws collectively mean that if you see a parade of heavily-armed microcephalics knuckle-dragging their way into your place of business, you are legally justified to start blasting away without further ado.

Considering the actual skill in handling firearms these birds usually possess, they'll probably respond by shooting each other.

Reagan was basically paying back the Soviets for Vietnam. He did it mostly by supplying the Mujahedin with one weapon - handheld surface-to-air missiles. These nullified Soviet air superiority, leaving their ground forces at the mercy of suicidal fighters who knew every nook and cranny of the terrain. Sound familiar?
The real problems began after Reagan left office, when his political heir, George H. W. Bush, decided that the Soviet exit from Afghanistan marked the end of having to pay attention to it. Afghanistan was left a smoldering ruin, the deep concerns expressed by the Americans and others for the Afghan people exposed as lies.
As the Afghanis, impoverished and left to starve, realized they'd been used by the West as proxies to fight the Soviets, bitterness sunk in. Polygonal civil war and chaos ensued, until the Osama Bin Laden-funded Taliban took over most of the country, and imposed a horrific sort of order.
Their treatment by Bush the Elder in the 1990's guaranteed how the Afghans would react to Bush the Younger twenty years later - cynically, interested only in exploiting 9/11 and its aftermath, just as they had been exploited as pawns in the conflict between the West and the USSR. Afghanis aren't people you can fool more than once.
"When the dust of dispute had settled, however, North’s indictments were overturned on appeal in 1990. The court ruling signaled that the Iran-Contra affair was essentially another chapter in the long-running political dispute between the president and Congress over control of foreign policy, rather than a criminal conspiracy."
Actually, because Democrats in Congress had foolishly called North to testify before them, his subsequent convictions were overturned because the prosecution was unable to show they weren't at least in part due to evidence derived from his mandated Congressional testimony.
Even scoundrels have the right not to be coerced to self-incriminate.

To this day in the South, whites are taught and believe that the Civil War (AKA The War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression, etc.) was fundamentally about States Rights and resistance to Unconstitutional Federal actions. I normally have to quote a half dozen Secession proclamations, the Confederate Constitution, the Confederate president, etc. all saying that this is all about slavery before my students/colleagues/neighbors concede that it might have also been about slavery, a little.
My wife went to law school with a black woman who'd graduated from a Robert E. Lee High School in North Carolina, and she thought the Civil War was about States Rights. My white, sixth generation Texan wife had to work hard to set her straight.

I'm an old, too-often disappointed, embittered liberal. When I suffer and despair in the future, I'll recall Cayden and know that being part of the movement which gave him to the world makes it worthwhile.

I don't respond to strawmanners. I'll defend what I posted, not your distortion of it.
Cuban troops, acting in the same capacity as American troops in Vietnam prior to 1963, were supporting the government in Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution there, and in El Salvador on the rebel side during its civil war, also after 1979.
Liberals who deny the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its client states from the 1940s to the 1980s make our side look either ignorant or mendacious to critics who know better.

Totally different? I'd say more or less the same. Hook up with squalid, murderous dictatorships to fight more dangerous, squalid, murderous dictatorships.

Sometimes there's nothing but bad guys and worse guys.

Cuban troops, acting as proxies for the Soviets.