Former US President Ronald Reagan, who died last week, is hailed by admiring analysts for bringing an end to the repressive Soviet Union, which he dubbed the “Evil Empire”. But they do not mention the fact that the Soviet bloc's impossible economic policies would have finished off the “Evil Empire” over a reasonable amount of time even if Moscow had not engaged in the ruinous arms race initiated by Reagan.
Critical commentators point out that Reagan, adopting the policy of “the friend of my enemy is my friend”, backed the genocidal Khmer Rouge in its struggle against the pro-Russian North Vietnamese who had ousted it from power, the Nicaragua Contras in their drive to topple the leftist Sandinistas, Jonas Savimbi and his Unita in its cruel civil conflict in Angola, and the Mujahedeen in their war against Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan.
Few pundits analysing his career have taken a sharp look at his policies in this region. It is important to do so because the Reagan administration provided the ideological basis and personnel of the current Bush administration. On the ideological front, the Reagan administration separated the world scene into two camps: “those who are for us and those who are against us”.
The Bush administration has followed suit. Under Reagan, the enemies of the US were “reds”, “Soviets” or “communists”, under Bush they are “terrorists”, particularly “Islamic fundamentalist terrorists”. Such simple-minded world views generally produce a civilisational divide as well as disastrous policies.
The personalities in the Reagan administration who played key roles in setting its ideological bent and elaborating policies are the very same who now dominate the Bush administration. The senior-most figure is Richard Perle, who served as assistant secretary of defence under Reagan and as chairman of the influential Defence Policy Board during the first phase of the Bush administration — until he was compelled to resign due to conflict of commercial interests. Nevertheless, he still remains powerful. Paul Wolfowitz, the current deputy defence secretary and the military brains of the Bush administration, served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs and ambassador to Indonesia under Reagan. The present number three in the Defence Department, Douglas Feith, was on Reagan's National Security Council, deputy assistant secretary of defence for negotiations policy and special counsel to Perle. While they carried over into both Bush administrations some of the tenets of Reagan's conservatism, over the years they transformed it into a wholly new ideology which became known as “neoconservatism”.
Under the guidance of men like Perle and other committed Zionists in his administration, Reagan became the most “pro-Israel” US president ever — until George Bush II moved into the Oval Office. In pursuit of its war against the Soviet Union, the Reagan administration financed, armed and trained the “Mujahedeen”, Arab and Muslim militants from across the region who fought the Soviet army in Afghanistan. When the conflict ended in the early 1990s, veterans of this conflict, known as “Afghans”, returned to their home countries and began to wage war against their own governments, creating instability and uncertainty in the region.
Reagan played a double game by backing Iraq against Iran. In 1981, when Moscow sent arms to Baghdad to help it prosecute the war against Iran — which began in 1980 — the Reagan administration dispatched Donald Rumsfeld, its special regional envoy, to Baghdad and sold weapons to Iraq. But it did not mean that Reagan was committed to the security of Iraq. The Reagan administration did nothing to criticise or punish Israel for bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. Its pro-Israel position on this key action grew into approval for all Israel's policies. Through an Israeli connection, the Reagan administration subsequently sold arms to Iran with the aim of securing funding for the right-wing Contra destabilisation campaign against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
In May 1982, Reagan's Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave the then-Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon the “green light” to carry out his plan for a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. This amounted to a reversal of the administration policy which had been to seek accommodation rather than conflict between the Palestinians and Israel.
At the time Haig gave his approval, Sharon had been making preparations for his campaign in Lebanon since August 1981 when the Palestine Liberation Organisation agreed to a unilateral US-brokered ceasefire on the Lebanese border with Israel. In early June 1982, Israel sent 76,000 troops and 1,200 tanks into Lebanon. Israel ignored the resolution from the Security Council to withdraw from Lebanon and besieged West Beirut, the mainly Muslim sector of the capital. The unprotected city with more than a million inhabitants was bombarded from land, sea and air until Aug. 12, when Nancy Reagan, the president's wife — who took pity on the Lebanese because she had seen a wounded girl on television — demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin call a halt. By this time, 20,000 civilians had died and 30,000 had been wounded. Another 1,800 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered by the pro-Israel Phalange militia when Sharon personally introduced this force into the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, in mid-September, following the assassination of Phalange leader Bashir Gemayel, Israel's choice for president of Lebanon.
On Sept. 2, 1982, Reagan enunciated his peace plan in which he called for Israel's withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. He said, however, that Israel should retain certain strategic tracts of land, Jerusalem should remain undivided and there should be no Palestinian state. When Begin flatly turned down his plan, Reagan backed away from it.
In 1986, Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya, allegedly in retaliation for its involvement in a bombing of a cafÈ frequented by US troops in Germany. In 1988, during Reagan's watch, an Iranian civilian jet was shot down by a US battleship in the Gulf, killing 290 passengers. This exacerbated the already deep rift between the US and Iran, which opened in 1979 when the shah, Washington's ally and close friend, was overthrown by the populace and succeeded by an anti-US clerical regime.
During his two terms in office (1981-89), Reagan sowed in Washington's rich conspiratorial soil the seeds of the unilateralist, pro-Israel and anti-Arab mantraps which have bloomed under the administration of George W. Bush. Reagan's gardeners, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and others, were on duty but not fully in charge during his presidency. Under George H.W. Bush, they were curbed. But they are free to do whatever they want under his son. Thus, the damage Reagan inflicted on the countries and peoples of the Middle East is not confined to the period of his presidency but carries on and on.