Hitch On Dutch: "He Was Dumb As A Stump"

My defintive send-off to Uncle Ronnie has just been posted. Please read the entire column to experience the full blast of my vitriol. Here's a taste:

Some of us remember Reagan in very different terms. The single moment that most stands out in my mind was the early evening of March 23, 1983. Not a significant date for most. But that afternoon I was driving a dangerous highway back to the capital of San Salvador from the war-embattled eastern province of Morazan. I switched on the AM radio in my rented van and found the scratchy, static-laden frequency of the Voice of America. It was carrying a live broadcast of a much-heralded Reagan speech on national security — a speech in which he not only painted Central America as a dire, imminent threat to America and its people but also unveiled his sweeping Strategic Defensive Initiative, known popularly as Star Wars.

I had just come a few days earlier from a week in Guatemala, where a U.S.-supported and visibly deranged army general by the name of Efrain Rios Montt — who shared Reagan’s view that the locals were a threat to world peace — was carrying out a scorched-earth campaign against hundreds of rural Mayan communities, killing thousands of indigenous and scattering even more to the winds. The devastation I saw was heartbreaking, almost biblical in the scope of destruction.

I had also recently been in what Reagan called in that speech "Marxist" Nicaragua — the second poorest country in the hemisphere. Most of its 3 million people couldn’t scare up three squares, it had few roads, little infrastructure, and what was there rarely worked. Up along the Honduran border I saw subsistence Nicaraguan farming communities bury their young in rolling, rocky pastures as Reagan’s "contras" — the right-wing army led by officers of the former Somoza dictatorship that Reagan funded and compared to "our Founding Fathers" — took their toll. The ruling Sandinistas, given to revolutionary bravado, left much to be desired by democratic standards. But to posit, as Reagan did, that they threatened the security of the United States makes George W. Bush’s similar arguments about Saddam look, in comparison, downright compelling.

These scenes were rolling through my head as Reagan spoke that night. But I was mostly obsessed with what I saw right before me as I headed west on the Pan-American Highway: El Salvador. Here the Reagan administration was spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year (eventually a couple of billion) to bankroll what was without any question one of the most murderous regimes in the world. In the name of crushing a small leftist insurgency, the U.S. stood by as literally tens of thousands of civilians were arrested, tortured, and often mangled and mutilated, before being dumped in one or another killing field.

What was so astounding, so galling, as I listened to that speech wasn’t that Reagan was defending our support of what essentially was the wrong side. It was rather the obviously false, I would say delusional, premise of his argument. The unrest in Central America, he argued, was nothing but a direct product of Soviet (and Cuban and Nicaraguan) regional subversion. I’m not going to rehash that argument 20 years later other than to say it was a downright and simplistic lie.

But now Reagan was going a step further. After imposing a Cold War matrix on local regional conflicts, he was now proposing — via Star Wars — to project that Cold War into outer space. As darkness set down on that Salvadoran highway and Reagan finished his speech vowing to spend billions more to erect a space shield against a hardly credible threat of Russian attack, I felt like I was driving ever deeper into an endless, black void.

If my rant on Reagan doesn't piss you off enough, then see what my old buddy Christopher Hitchens has to say about the Gipper. How about: "He was as dumb as a stump."

More from The Hitch:

Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

Comments

[steve]

Michael, when you refer to the 'antiwar' press, are you referring to Judy Miller and Michael Gordon at the NYT or the Washington Post editorial staff? or the wall street journal? Los Angeles Times? Where is this conspiracy of an 'anti-war' media that you imagine?

[Michael J. Totten]

Steve,

It depends. NYT editorial board, yes. Judith Miller personally, no. LA Times, I dunno because I don't read it. Fox News, no. NPR, yes. Reuters, oh yeah. BBC, big fat yes.

My Web site? No.

I don't see any conspiracy. My mind doesn't work that way.

[steve]

Michael, NYT editorial board? really? hmm, Bill Keller? He was editor at the time of the invasion, he was prowar. Their objections to the invasion were lukewarm, they wanted UN involvement, like Thomas Friedman and supported the invasion in any event.
NPR prowar? you obvoiusly haven't been listeening to All Things Considered. Scott Simon supported the war openly and was quite transparent about it in his interviews and selections for interviews. Neal Conan antiwar? Where do you get this fantasy [or conspiracy theory?] from really?
So let's see, we've got a prowar NYT, Pro war Washington Post, Prowar WSJ, Prowar CNN [I know, I know, that radical Lou Dobbs is a bit much to the left], Prowar NY Post, Daily News, Washington Times, Miami Herald...MSNBC, FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS all presenting a a pretty consistent uncritical presentation of Bush's lies about WMDs etc. etc.
Reliance on prowar government sources, etc. etc...
Only in the prowar paranoid vision is there an 'antiwar' media in the US...
BBC? and what percentage of Americans listen to BBC? Don't forget Haaretz while you're at it in showing 'proof' of the 'antiwar media'...

[steve]

I don't see any conspiracy. My mind doesn't work that way.

--neither does mine, i'm with noam chomsky on the irrelevance of conspiracy theory. i'm also with him on the notion that america has an antiwar media as patently absurd.