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St. Ronnie: Three ironies/points of historical evidence in a stormy sea of nonsense and deliberate disinformation.
1.Mikhail Gorbachev, together with Eduard Shevardnadze, deserves the lion’s share of the credit for ending the Cold War and the era of Soviet tyranny. Ronald Reagan was among the last of Western leaders to embrace Gorbachev’s effort—long after Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Hans Dietrich Genscher—who was roundly mocked by Reagan supporters—for knowing something they didn’t. Reagan passed up a golden invitation to end the nuclear arms race when Gorbachev offered it to him on a silver platter in exchange for giving up his nutty dream of a star wars system. Reagan refused and today we are nearly eighty billion dollars poorer for it. Had it not been for Nancy Reagan’s worrying about her husband’s historical legacy, it’s quite possible that the Reagan hard-liners would have continued to reinforce the Soviet hard-liners and history would have been much less kind to both sides. From Sound and Fury:
In March, 1985, Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikhail Gorbachev's closest friend and adviser, turned to his new boss, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, and blurted out the fact that had eluded virtually the entire Soviet leadership since Stalin's time. "Everything's rotten," observed Shevardnadze, "it has to be changed." Through their willingness to accept this awful truth into their collective political psyche, the two men converted themselves from hedgehogs into foxes. Gorbachev was not exaggerating in the slightest when he explained that things were so bad that, "everything pertaining to the economy, culture, democracy, foreign policy--all spheres--had to be reappraised.” Thus began the series of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
2. One person who has reason to regret Reagan’s passing is Saddam Hussein, whom Reagan supported at the very moment he was known to be using poison gas inside his own borders. Right up until the day he invaded Kuwait, Mr. Hussein had been considered a valued commercial customer and regional balancing force by at least three American presidents. Both before and during his invasion of Iran, Hussein had enjoyed private screenings of U.S. satellite intelligence data. When the war with Iran ended and he turned his poison-gas pellets on his own Kurdish population, Hussein continued to receive sophisticated American technology and taxpayer-subsidized grain. From The Book on Bush:
3. Moreover, many of the same people who promoted Bush’s war, including Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz and others, served in the Reagan/Bush Defense Department while this ad-hoc alliance was underway. Donald Rumsfeld, like former Republican presidential nominee, Robert Dole, personally visited Hussein in Baghdad during the period of gassing as a special emissary of President Ronald Reagan, in December, 1983, and managed to avoid the distasteful topic. (Talking points and minutes of the meeting demonstrate that that Rumsfeld’s primary interest was in keeping Hussein informed about America’s changing Middle East policy. He also wished to discuss a proposal by the Bechtel Corporation to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to Aqaba, in Jordan, as well as to make sure that Iraq not attack Iran’s oil facilities.)
As I mentioned above, Reagan’s primary foreign policy achievement, embracing Mikhail Gorbachev’s prophetic quest to end the Cold War, was bitterly opposed by many of those claiming to revere his name. In May 2, 1982, Norman Podhoretz wrote of “The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy” in The New York Times Magazine arguing that Reagan had "in practice been following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire, rather than a strategy aimed at encouraging the breakup of that empire from within." According to Paul Nitze, during the early days of the START talks, "Pentagon civilian officials - particularly Richard Perle [then Secretary of defense for International Security Policy] and Caspar Weinberger – were deliberately excluded from the discussion. Otherwise the howls and leaks from Weinberger and Perle and their supporters would have made the project impossible."
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