Reagan Would Define Conservatism Today

For the record Reagan was a mediocre president and presided over one of the worst presidential scandals ever (Iran-Contra) in which his administration illegally sold weapons to Iran, you know those people conservatives usually freak out about, in order to finance central american death squads best known for their propensity to rape nuns.

Yes, the events of the late Bush administration makes the deification of Reagan (Limbaugh has said his face should be added to Mt. Rushmore) particularly bizarre. Bush, of course, tried to make Iran the center of all evil. He pressed for congress to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a "terrorist organization." That's the very group to whom Reagan was selling sophisticated missiles. The proceeds from those sales were being diverted to a terrorist army in Central America.

People forget that's what the "contras" were. The contras had no political program. They didn't wage any sort of "civil war" in Nicaragua. All they did was sit behind Reagan-provided U.S. military protection in bordering countries and launch cross-border terrorist attacks on the civilian population in Nicaragua, then retreat to the safety of those U.S. guns.

The contras were made up of former officers of the (fascist) Somoza national guard and secret police, plus a gaggle of mercenaries, drug lords, and whoever the lot of them could shanghai. They'd started as a small group (one the Pentagon flatly labeled a terrorist group), then Reagan adopted them as his own, poured in huge amounts of money and weaponry, imported, as trainers, the murderous Argentine generals responsible for that countries' "dirty war" against its own population, and unleashed them on Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Marxist Sandinistas, demonized by Reagan as would-be dictators, built a modern liberal democracy in the country, one that has continued to this day. Iran-contra was only one part of this.

And that's only one example. Reagan was, during his administration, the major terrorist in the world. The contras holed up in Honduras, where other Reagan-backed goons maintained power via a reign of terror. In El Savlador and Guatmala, it was much worse; the Reagan-supported governments waged a terrorist war on their own people, murdering by the tens of thousands, while Reagan kept the money and the weaponry flowing, telling whatever lies were required to do so.

The U.S. is up to its neck in a quagmire in Iraq. Left out of the veneration of Reagan is the fact that Saddam Hussein was, to a significant degree, his invention, and his administration supported Saddam through all the atrocities with which the political right loves to assail us today. When Saddam Hussein first employed chemical weapons, the world recoiled in horror. The Reagan response was to send Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to re-open formal diplomatic relations, to take Iraq off the list of terrorist sponsors, at a time when Iraq harbored some of the worst terrorists in the world, and to begin transferring large amounts of WMD tech and materials to Iraq. U.S. military advisors aided Saddam in his war against Iran, including sharing large amoutns of inel, helping him plan WMD attacks, and even offering naval support. When Saddam launched his campaign against the Kurds in the late '80s, he employed chemical weapons (some of the cyanide came from the U.S.), and Reagan, Bush, and the Republicans beat back an effort, in congress, to sanction Iraq. When a Commerce employee discovered that Iraq was using U.S. agricultural credits for weapons purchases, he excitedly informed his superiors. Of course, they already knew it, and Bush's response was to transfer the employee to a different department and ask congress for another $2.5 billion in ag credits for Iraq. And so on.

The same is true with Afghanistan. There were seven major factions of mujahadeen fighting the Soviets. Reagan adopted, as the recipient of over 95% of U.S. aid, the Hekmatyar faction, a Muslim fundamentalist group notorious for throwing acid in the face of women who didn't wear the veil and peeling religious dissenters alive, and who spent more time killing other Afghanis than killing Soviets. Out of this faction--support for which became, under Reagan, the largest operation in the history of the CIA--came, among other great humanitarians, Mullah Omar, later leader of the Taliban, Omar Abedel Rahman, later the mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the group, who is, today, still waging war against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and the paymaster Osama bin Laden, who needs no introduction.

This list is almost endless. This is what the Reagan administration was all about, and the already-creepy conservative deification of Reagan--and "deification" is the right word--is rendered even more bizarre in a "War On Terror" world, where we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars picking up the mess he made.