Trust you Croc to jump on the one sentence that stands out.

Yeah, I think the USSR should have left Afghanistan alone. I have mentioned that several times here in this forum.
Definitely a cause I sympathised with in my teens - I even had a little button for it on my school bag for a while. "Sovjet ut ur Afghanistan!" But it's over 20 years ago now. It's hard to muster up strong feelings about it.So much has been happening since then.

But at least it was next door, so they had some kind of half reasonable excuse of ensuring stability at their borders, whereas the USA has no excuse that makes any sense unless you factor in regional politics or the Afghanistan oil pipeline. I don't buy for a second that anyone in the US is so stupid that they thought they'd finish moslem terrorism by taking over Afghanistan.

But if you compare the USAs invasions in the last 20-30 years, with the record of the USSR, I think it's pretty obvious who is the most aggressive. They USSR did not operate at a rate of a new war or invasion every 2-3 years like the USA has been for a very long period of time.