Quote Originally Posted by Ramil View Post
Only partially. Oh, have they done something good when I wasn't looking?
Everything is measured in comparison. What have the Soviet Union done to the Middle East in those glorious days?
When it comes to Egypt, it was all sold inside out to the USSR until the mid 70 at which point it turned out it doesn't pay off to be allies with the USSR. Then Egypt found a new ally, the US and this way it got much more. Because of that, Egypt was one of the strongest allies to the US in the Middle East and, under Mubarak "Egypt was a member of the allied coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, and Egyptian infantry were some of the first to land in Saudi Arabia to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait." (Hosni Mubarak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) The US did not have any apparent reasons to change Mubarak, it was done by someone else. However, the US didn't save his long-term ally either. The gratitude of the politicians is proverbial... yeah...

Having said that, I'm not really sure what's the point of the caricature. It's not like the US didn't pay for the oil, did they? By the way, the Soviet Union exported their oil too, to those same capitalists, so why wouldn't they write СССР beside Ближний Восток?

As to the "blood" that is shed, I think the USSR should have sat quiet like a mouse, since the dominant majority of the Middle East countries have adopted the soviet weapons (until today) and the USSR was a major exporter of those weapons to the Middle East. On the other hand, Israel adopted NATO weapons. It has never been a secret the Middle East was a field testing for the soviet and the NATO weapons. (And not only the Middle East, by the way.)