06-07-2004, 04:31 PM
I'll repeat: Reagan was not a great president. He sold weapons to terrorists.
At one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.
Reagan took a "blame the victim" approach to the AIDS crisis. His inability to come to terms with the horrible human tragedy here, or with the emerging science on it, made his health policies ineffective and even destructive.
Among his achievements in office was to break the air traffic controllers' union. It was not important in and of itself, but it was a symbol of his determination that the powerless would not be allowed to organize to get a better deal. He ruined a lot of lives. I doubt he made us safer in the air.
In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was flat in the 1980s. I won't argue that Reagan may have hastened the demise of the Soviet Union, but in doing so he left us with defecits that we'll be paying interest on for decades.
Reagan also had a hand in creating al-Qaeda. Yes, it's true! By the mid 80s, Reagan was giving them half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the US contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Osama bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was nuts, and balked at giving AQ ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow them to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that al-Qaeda would eventually become a security threat in their own right.
Now, let's go a little more in-depth on the whole "selling weapons to terrorists" issue. Reagan's officials hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua. Congress cut off money for the right wing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it.
At the same time they were supplying Iran with weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, they also turned a blind eye to Saddam's use of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret message that the US did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian troops, whatever it said publicly.
Reagan's policies have directly resulted in the problems we face today - namely, Islamic terrorism and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are also indications that he was beginning to suffer the effects of Alzheimer's disease long before he left office. In 1987, testifying before the Tower Commission, he was asked why his more recent testimony seemed to contradict earlier statements he made. Reagan consulted his notes, looked up and said with a straight face, "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."
Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those limitations should be removed in his memory.
Edited By Sir O on 1086625913
At one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.
Reagan took a "blame the victim" approach to the AIDS crisis. His inability to come to terms with the horrible human tragedy here, or with the emerging science on it, made his health policies ineffective and even destructive.
Among his achievements in office was to break the air traffic controllers' union. It was not important in and of itself, but it was a symbol of his determination that the powerless would not be allowed to organize to get a better deal. He ruined a lot of lives. I doubt he made us safer in the air.
In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was flat in the 1980s. I won't argue that Reagan may have hastened the demise of the Soviet Union, but in doing so he left us with defecits that we'll be paying interest on for decades.
Reagan also had a hand in creating al-Qaeda. Yes, it's true! By the mid 80s, Reagan was giving them half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the US contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Osama bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was nuts, and balked at giving AQ ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow them to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that al-Qaeda would eventually become a security threat in their own right.
Now, let's go a little more in-depth on the whole "selling weapons to terrorists" issue. Reagan's officials hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua. Congress cut off money for the right wing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it.
At the same time they were supplying Iran with weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, they also turned a blind eye to Saddam's use of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret message that the US did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian troops, whatever it said publicly.
Reagan's policies have directly resulted in the problems we face today - namely, Islamic terrorism and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are also indications that he was beginning to suffer the effects of Alzheimer's disease long before he left office. In 1987, testifying before the Tower Commission, he was asked why his more recent testimony seemed to contradict earlier statements he made. Reagan consulted his notes, looked up and said with a straight face, "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."
Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those limitations should be removed in his memory.
Edited By Sir O on 1086625913