s." (Kinzer and Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit; Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network)
In similar vein, one of the most reputable analysts of British foreign policy, Ritchie Ovendale, noted with regards to the British intervention in Malaya, that Britain was "fighting the communist terrorists to enable Malaya to become independent and help itself…to prevent the spread of communism and resist Russian expansion."
Malaya, in fact, was deemed the "greatest material prize in South-East Asia," for which independence from Western control was not an option. As to the "communist terrorists," according to the Colonial Office four years after the beginning of the emergency. "No operational links have been established as existing" between Malaya and Soviet or Chinese communists, with no material support being offered.
Wherever we look during the cold war we find that the perception of the Soviet military threat expressed in high-level secret documents is very different from that which was claimed to be perceived. The Middle East, for example, was, in popular mythology, at permanent risk of a Soviet push to the Persian Gulf. In July 1950, the British Chiefs of staff noted that "the success of indirect or subversive action by the Soviet government…in any of the Arab states or in Israel is improbable in the immediate future." The threat of direct Soviet action was not even deemed worth discussing. The U.S. State Department noted in 1950 that communist parties were "non-existent in Yemen and Saudi Arabia; outlawed in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon and apparently unorganised in Jordan." Indeed "throughout the Arab states, at the present time, extreme rightist or ultra-nationalist elements may exercise greater influence and form a greater threat to the maintenance of a pro-Western orientation than the communists."
Astonishing though it may seem for someone exposed to the propaganda blitz of the post-war period, the same is true of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Iran, British Guinea, and any number of other places where attacks were launched against "international communism."
The same lack of evidence for a communist threat was reported wherever intelligence agencies were operative. So, if there was little or no communist, or Soviet, threat to the Middle East, "Black" Africa, North Africa, the Far East, South Asia, and South-eastern Asia, historian Mark Curtis writes, "there were not many areas left where communism or the Soviet Union could be supposed to be on the march."
The U.S. government’s own Bureau of the Budget refuted the alarmist thesis put forward in the NSC68 report cited above, noting in May 1950 that "NSC68 is based on the assumption that the military power of the USSR and its satellites is increasing in relation to that of the U.S. and its allies…it is hard to accept a conclusion that the USSR is approaching a straight-out military superiority over us when, for example, (1) our Air Force is vastly superior qualitatively, is greatly superior numerically in bombers, trained crews and other facilities necessary for offensive warfare; (2) our supply of fission bombs is much greater than that of the USSR, as is our thermonuclear potential; (3) our Navy is so much stronger than that of the USSR that they should not be mentioned in the same breath; (4) the economic health and military potential of our allies is, with our help, growing daily; and (5) while we have treaties of alliance with and are furnishing arms to countries bordering the USSR, the USSR has none with countries within thousands of miles from us."
The threat of a Soviet Union bent on military confrontation with the West was a giant hoax with several advantages. One benefit was that it enabled governments to secure vast public subsidy of high-tech industry through massive defense spending programs. Big business had everything to gain from responding to a terrible threat, just as big business now stands to lose massively from responding to the threat of global warming: "To a remarkable degree, containment has been the product, not so much of what the Russians have done