www.consortiumnews.com/2009/060309.html
By Robert Parry June 3, 2009 There's been talk that George W Bush was so inept that he should trademark the phrase "Worst President Ever," though some historians would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan. Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the competition.
print Printer friendly Granted, the very idea of rating Reagan as one of the worst presidents ever will infuriate his many right-wing acolytes and offend Washington insiders who have made a cottage industry out of buying some protection from Republicans by lauding the 40th President. But there's a growing realization that the starting point for many of the catastrophes confronting the United States today can be traced to Reagan's presidency. There's also a grudging reassessment that the "failed" presidents of the 1970s - Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter - may deserve more credit for trying to grapple with the problems that now beset the country. Nixon, Ford and Carter won scant praise for addressing the systemic challenges of America's oil dependence, environmental degradation, the arms race, and nuclear proliferation - all issues that Reagan essentially ignored and that now threaten America's future. Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; Nixon's administration also detected the growing weakness in the Soviet Union and advocated a policy of dtente (a plan for bringing the Cold War to an end or at least curbing its most dangerous excesses). After Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal, Ford continued many of Nixon's policies, particularly trying to wind down the Cold War with Moscow. However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan's Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned "dtente." Ford also let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives) pressure the CIA's analytical division, and he brought in a new generation of hard-liners, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. After defeating Ford in 1976, Carter injected more respect for human rights into US foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it hard-pressed to justify the repressive internal practices of the East Bloc. Carter also emphasized the need to contain the spread of nuclear weapons, especially in unstable countries like Pakistan. Domestically, Carter pushed a comprehensive energy policy and warned Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a national security threat, what he famously called "the moral equivalent of war." However, powerful vested interests - both domestic and foreign - managed to exploit the shortcomings of these three presidents to sabotage any sustained progress. By 1980, Reagan had become a pied piper luring the American people away from the tough choices that Nixon, Ford and Carter had defined. Cruelty with a Smile With his superficially sunny disposition - and a ruthless political strategy of exploiting white-male resentments - Reagan convinced millions of Americans that the threats they faced were: African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal government. In his First Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; When it came to cutting back on America's energy use, Reagan's message could be boiled down to the old reggae lyric, "Don't worry, be happy." Rather than pressing Detroit to build smaller, fuel-efficient cars, Reagan made clear that the auto industry could manufacture gas-guzzlers without much nagging from Washington. Reagan intentionally staffed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department with officials who were hostile toward regulation aimed at protecting the environment. George W Bush didn't invent Republican hostility toward scientific warnings of environmental calamities; Reagan pushed for deregulation of industries, including banking; he slashed income taxes for the wealthiest Americans in an experiment known as "supply side" economics, which held falsely that cutting rates for the rich would increase revenues and eliminate the federal deficit. Over the years, "supply side" would evolve into a secular religion for many on the Right, but Reagan's budget director David Stockman once blurted out the truth, that it would lead to red ink "as far as the eye could see." While conceding that some of Reagan's economic plans did not work out as intended, his defenders - including many mainstream journalists - still argue that Reagan should be hailed as a great President because he "won the Cold War," a short-hand phrase that they like to attach to his historical biography. However, a strong case can be made that the Cold War was won well before Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s, it was a common perception in the US intelligence community that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was winding down, in large part because the Soviet economic model had failed in the technological race with the West. That was the view of many Kremlinologists in the CIA's analytical division. Also, I was told by a senior CIA's operations official that some of the CIA's best spies inside the Soviet hierarchy supported the view that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, not surging toward world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team insisted in the early 1980s. The CIA analysis was the basis for the dtente that was launched by Nixon and Ford, essentially seeking a negotiated solution to the most dangerous remaining aspects of the Cold War. The Afghan Debacle In that view, Soviet military operations, including sending troops into Afghanistan in 1979, were mostly defensive in nature. In Afghanistan, the Soviets hoped to prop up a pro-communist government that was seeking to modernize the country but was beset by opposition from Islamic fundamentalists who were getting covert support from the US government. Though the Afghan covert operation originated with Cold Warriors in the Carter administration, especially national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded US acquiescence toward Pakistan's nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden). While Reagan's acolytes cite the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as decisive in "winning the Cold War," the counter-argument is that Moscow was already in disarray - and while failure in Afghanistan may have sped the Soviet Union's final collapse - it also created twin dangers for the future of the world: the rise of al-Qaeda terrorism and the nuclear bomb in the hands of Pakistan's unstable Islamic Republic. Trade-offs elsewhere in the world also damaged long-term US interests. In Latin America, for instance, Reagan's brutal strategy of arming right-wing militaries to crush peasant, student and labor uprisings left the region with a legacy of anti-Americanism that is now resurfacing in the emergence of populist leftist governments. In Nicaragua, for instance, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega (whom Reagan once denounced as a "dictator in designer glasses") is now back in power. In El Salvador, the leftist FMLN won the latest elections. Indeed, across the region, hostility to Washington is now the rule, creating openings for China, Iran, Cuba and other American rivals. In the early 1980s, Reagan also credentialed a young generation of neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called "perception management," the shaping of how Americans saw, understood and were frightened by threats from abroad. Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, US intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the propaganda demands from above. To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era's feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American...
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