Ron Hart, in his latest column: “Ronald Reagan, who only ended the Cold War and brought down the Berlin Wall, did not win a Nobel Peace Prize.”
Now certainly ending the Cold War was an impressive accomplishment—and at a time when conservatives decried Reagan as a naive twit indulging in “appeasement” for not seeing this was a Soviet scam—and he probably deserved it as much as Gorbachev did. But Reagan’s record was hardly that of a peacemaker.
•In El Salvador he supported a dictatorship that murdered priests and nuns for teaching peasants to read (Reagan reported to Congress that the country was doing a great job preserving human rights).
•He greenlighted Saddam’s use of poison gas on Iranian soldiers. Our only reservation was that it might make it harder to condemn the use of chemical weapons when employed by sociopaths who weren’t working for us.
•He sold weapons to Iran. Funny, Hart was blasting Obama in the previous column for being naive about trusting the Iranians would make peace; apparently if Obama were selling them weapons, that would be A-OK. Well, actually not: Obama’s a Democrat, Reagan’s a Republican saint, so they can hardly be judged by the same standard.
•He funded the Afghanistanian mujahedeen as proxy soldiers against the Soviets. The people who later turned into Taliban and gave shelter to al-Qaida.
•He directed the CIA to lie to Congress about Pakistan having a nuclear program because that would have resulted in sanctions and Pakistan was our chief supply route to the mujahedeen. So now we have a nuclear-armed nation in an unstable part of the world, with government ties to Islamic extremists.
All in all, Reagan’s support for peace, democracy and freedom was non-existent any time they weren’t convenient for us.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.