Cold War Victors

Everette E. Dennis claims that “ We Didn’t Win the Cold War” (Commentary, Aug. 17). For 44 years, we engaged in a struggle. The Communists boasted that they would bury us and backed up their boast with a fearsome arsenal and an aggressive ideology. Now our former enemy is discredited and has ceased to exist. Dennis, however, does not consider this a victory for America. Indeed, the very idea is, according to him, “presumptuous, ethnocentric and insulting to the people and places it describes.” After all, people in the former communist nations deserve credit for their revolutions and reforms. Of course they do but by Dennis’ logic, America also did not win World War II. After all, others contributed to that victory as well.

If Dennis had written about World War II with the same logic that he writes about the Cold War, he would be laughed at. I suggest that his statements about the Cold War deserve the same derision.

ANDREW G. KADAR, Los Angeles