Truthout — Bush Is No Reagan, But…
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By Steve Weissman
compliments of t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 10 June 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061004A.shtml
Ronald Reagan is a tough act to follow, as no one feels more this week than George W. Bush.
Reagan walked tall, but spoke softly. Confident rather than cocky, he felt comfortable in his own skin in a way that poor Mr. Bush never will. Sunny rather than brash, he knew his limits, admitted mistakes, and rarely crowed. Always gracious, he extended the hand of friendship to his political foes, and did it without a grimace.
My favorite of his friendly rivals was Tip O’Neill, the six-foot-three, three-hundred-pound Massachusetts Democrat who served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Tip loathed Mr. Reagan’s politics. He blasted the president as “Herbert Hoover with a smile” and “a cheerleader for selfishness.” Yet, personally, the two men got along well.
“I have known every president since Harry Truman and there’s no question in my mind that Ronald Reagan was the worst,” said the old liberal giant. But, Tip added, “he would have made a hell of a king.”
Especially in Mr. Reagan’s second term, many suspected he was no longer king, but only playing one on TV. Who can forget the proud man trying to make a speech while looking wistfully at his loving wife Nancy as she mouthed the words he could not recall? Even then, he somehow managed to maintain his regal bearing.
Mr. Bush is a very different actor. Yet, in many ways, Reagan pioneered the role that his understudy now tries so desperately to play.
Nowhere do we see the lineage more clearly than in the transcendent myth of Reagan’s reign, that he won the Cold War and caused the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Reagan himself claimed the victory, and the first Bush Administration honed the legend to perfection. Now, even Reagan’s staunchest critics believe it true, at least in good part.
The storyline reads like a Hollywood script. An anti-communist hawk from the earliest days of the Cold War, Mr. Reagan came into office intent on doing battle with “the Evil Empire.” He was no longer content simply to contain the Soviets, as American leaders had tried to do since the 1940s. He would crush them.
His first step was to build American military power to new heights, creating a threat that set Soviet leaders back on their heels. He threatened them even more with his Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, which promised to block Soviet missiles from ever reaching American shores, while leaving our nukes free to obliterate any Soviet target we chose without fear of counter-attack.
Forget detente. Goodbye arms control. Reagan openly sought unquestioned nuclear dominance, which would bring the Soviet Union to its knees.
As the story goes, Mr. Reagan’s strategy went far beyond the military. By vastly escalating the economic costs of competing with the United States, he would force the Soviets to back down without our ever having to fire the first nuclear missile. When their new leader Mikhail Gorbachev cried Uncle, Mr. Reagan warmly welcomed him to the negotiating table, while patiently waiting for the mortally wounded Soviet Empire to give up the ghost.
It’s a wonderful story, which historians will continue to debate in every nuance for decades to come. But three glaring holes stand out.
First, the more scholars learn about the former Soviet Union, the more clearly they see how it collapsed primarily from its own internal flaws. These included, among others, a wretched economy, growing weakness in high-tech, systematic corruption, a glaring imbalance between spending on guns and butter, an increasingly unsatisfied middle class, a failure ever to win the loyalty of its Eastern European satellites, and a tired ideology that no longer commanded allegiance, even among the ruling elites.
Second, Soviet leaders recognized, discussed, and wrote about these weaknesses before Reagan’s offensive, creating the internal ferment that ultimately brought Gorbachev to power.
Third, as far as we can tell, Soviet leaders generally saw Reagan’s over-hyped Star Wars defense as no realistic threat, and never significantly tried to compete with his military spending. A few wanted to respond in kind, which could have plunged the world into a new and exceedingly dangerous nuclear arms race. But – in spite of Reagan’s escalation, not because of it – Gorbachev and his allies chose a more peaceful path in hopes of pursing their own domestic reforms.
From the American side, the Reagan victory myth suffers a more paradoxical challenge. Few outside events weakened the Soviet Union more than its disastrous war against the American-backed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, for which the credit – or blame – goes back to Reagan’s predecessor Jimmy Carter and his Democratic administration.
In his memoirs, Carter’s CIA chief Robert Gates describes how the United States began secretly arming the Mujahideen in July 1979 – six months before Soviet tanks lumbered into their last-ever war. Thus began the largest covert military operation the CIA ever mounted, and the day Carter gave the go-ahead, his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told him that – for good or for bad – the American intervention might encourage the Soviets to invade.
In 1998, La Nouvelle Observateur asked Brzezinski if he had any regrets given the rise of Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda. Never known for his humility, the great man could only scoff.
“That secret operation was an excellent idea,” he said. “It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?”
So, who won the Cold War? And at what cost?
History offers few pat answers. The Soviet Union would likely have invaded Afghanistan even if Jimmy Carter had not sent the CIA to work with the mujihadeen, just as the Soviet Empire collapsed from within, and not from Mr. Reagan’s reckless nuclear gamble.
But no matter. Myths live on with scant regard to fact, and the story of how Reagan used American military might to win the Cold War shaped the Bush Administration both before and after 9/11.
Before, the President, his National Security Council, and the Pentagon were so caught up in planning their new Star Wars spending that they barely heard the terrorist warnings that Richard Clarke and others were trying desperately to bring to top-level attention.
After, Bush responded even more like Reagan, turning once again to American prowess. That’s how Ronald Reagan beat “the Evil Empire,” the understudy told us. That’s how Team Bush will beat “the Axis of Evil.”
Instead of seeing the terrorist threat as primarily political, and finding a broad mix of political, economic, and ideological means to wean the majority of the world’s Muslim’s away from the call to holy war, Bush dropped bombs and fired rockets – first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq – driving millions more into bin-Laden’s waiting arms.
Soldiers won the war. Let them run the peace. They need to win hearts and minds. Let them drop leaflets. They need better intelligence. Let them torture and sexually humiliate the people we want to love us. Leave it to the Pentagon, and let Colin Powell’s “Department of Nice” clean up the mess.
Armed might, a smart man once said, can kill people and break things. But it never won the Cold War, and it is losing the War on Terror.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.