Our foreign policy of the era deserves to be critically examined, not simply excused with "we stopped communism". We undermined democratically elected governments, assassinated labor leaders for the sake of our large corporations operating overseas, propped up military dictators, Trained murderers to be better murderers on our own soil and a host of other pretty nasty things and in spite of the Soviet union being long dead we are still doing the same thing.
Obama inc backing AQ linked rebels in Syria is a very bad policy by them.