Why the Republican Adulation of Ronald Reagan?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Not a day goes by without some aspiring conservative American politician calling himself an acolyte of Ronald Reagan. The 40th president of the United States has become an icon in the Republican Party.

It tells you how far the party has moved to the right ideologically. In the past six decades, there have been six Republican presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Reagan, and the two Bushes. Yet few current Republican hopefuls running for office mention the other five.

Eisenhower, Ford and George H.W. Bush were too liberal by modern Republican standards, Nixon resigned in disgrace due to the Watergate scandal, and George W. Bush remains too “toxic,” thanks to the wars in the Middle East and the financial collapse of 2008.

Yet Reagan seems beyond criticism, a president who walked on water. To Republicans, he has become a secular saint.

Of course such adulation depends on political amnesia. I worked in the United States between 1982 and 1990, including four years as a journalist in Washington while Reagan was president, and I don’t recall him being idolized at the time.

Yes, Reagan helped end the Cold War. People still remember his 1983 speech referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” But what were his other foreign policy accomplishments? The record is, to say the least, mixed.

Take Lebanon: American forces had been sent there in September 1983 as part of a Multinational Force to help the Lebanese government during that country’s horrific civil war. On Oct. 23, 1983, truck bombs driven by suicide bombers attacked the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. In early December, eight more U.S. Marines were killed.

At first, Reagan said the Marines would stay on. But as the civil war intensified, Reagan ordered the Marines to begin withdrawing from Lebanon; they were gone by Feb. 26, 1984. The American presence in Lebanon had accomplished very little.

Perhaps as a diversion, the president had also undertaken an invasion of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada on Oct. 25, 1983, just two days following the debacle in Beirut. It was meant to overthrow a left-wing regime that, Washington feared, might become too friendly with Cuba, as well as, ostensibly, to protect American medical students enrolled at an island university. The action was criticised by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Trinidad and Tobago. The UN General Assembly condemned it as “a flagrant violation of international law.”

In April 1986 terrorists bombed the La Belle discotheque in Berlin. Two American soldiers were killed and more than 150 people were injured. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was blamed and the president authorized strikes against targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. Though Reagan at the time called Gadhafi “the mad dog of the Middle East,” no further action was taken against the Libyan dictator, who two years later would blow up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, murdering a total of 270 people.

One could also blame Reagan for the current mess in Afghanistan. After the Soviets became embroiled in that country, Reagan was the one who sent billions of dollars in military aid to the mujahideen fighting the “godless Communists,” including Stinger surface-to-air missiles to shoot down aircraft.

The Soviets lost the war and left in 1989, but Reagan's “freedom fighters” would later morph into the Taliban, who eventually created one of the world's most repressive regimes -- plus providing a home for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida.

Regan’s greatest foreign policy disaster became known as the Iran-Contra affair. It almost led to his impeachment and also resulted in the Republican Party losing its majority in the U.S. Senate in November 1986.

It started in 1985, when the administration secretly began supplying weapons, including missiles, to Iran, in hopes of securing the release of hostages held by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. On account of the Iran-Iraq war, restrictions on arms sales to Iran were in place at the time.

The illegal sales, using Israel as a go-between, were carried out by members of the National Security Council, including two National Security advisors, Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter, and Lt. Col. Oliver North, an NSC staff member.

At North’s suggestion, the millions of dollars received from the weapons sales were then sent, also contrary to U.S. law, to the right-wing “Contra” guerrillas fighting the pro-Cuban Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

The Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa in November 1986 exposed the weapons-for-hostages deal.

A special review board created to look into the matter found Reagan accountable for a lax managerial style and aloofness from policy detail.

Though it could not prove definitively that Reagan had known about the secret arms transfers and Contra support, Congress on Nov. 18th, 1987 stated that he bore “ultimate responsibility” for wrongdoing by his aides, and that his administration exhibited “secrecy, deception and disdain for the law.”

McFarlane, North, Poindexter, and Reagan’s defence secretary Caspar Weinberger, all faced criminal charges as a result of Iran-Contra. North and Poindexter later had their convictions quashed, while McFarlane and Weinberger were pardoned by George H.W. Bush.

North, for one, always insisted that Reagan “knew everything” about the arms-for-hostages scandal and lied about it.

This is not exactly the stuff of greatness, but for some reason, Reagan has become a larger-than-life figure among Republicans. His failures and foibles have been shoved down the memory hole.