The resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan helped the popularity of George H.W. Bush during his presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988. “On October 18, 1988, Bush stopped at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, at the site of Winston Churchill’s 1946 historic speech warning that an ‘Iron Curtain’ of communism was descending across the European continent. …’The Iron Curtain still stretches from Stettin to Trieste,’ Bush said. ‘But it’s a rusting curtain. Shafts of light from the Western side, our side, the free and prosperous side, are piercing the gloom of failure and despair on the other side.’…Seventy years after the Russian Revolution, Bush said, Marxism is finally ‘losing its luster.’ At last, in the age of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (transformation), the Cold War was thawing and there was a sense of a new flexibility. One key reason for such historic changes, Bush said, was that ‘the price of aggression was too high, because we supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan.’ ”
– Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud, Pages 106-107