.
Riding Roughshod Over The Seas Of
History
by Matthew L. Brodsky
08/19/03 For the first time in its history, the U.S. Navy commissioned a
ship bearing
the name of a living ex-president - the USS Ronald Reagan. Maybe
it is
fitting a president known for his strength, resolve, and dedication to national security has his name emblazoned on a titanic
nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. According to the Navy, the
behemoth
stretches nearly 1,100 feet and towers 20 stories over the surf.
Look out,
bad guys, if the USS Ronald Reagan docks off your coast. As Vice
President
Dick Cheney boasted at the commissioning ceremony, "Something tells
me any
potential adversary of the United States will take note when word
arrives
that the USS Ronald Reagan has been sighted off shore."
"Today we send forth a great American ship bearing a great American
name,"
Cheney told the crowd. Sure, you have to agree that the aircraft
carrier is
"great" and awfully powerful. But surely some people,
including many
experts on the Reagan administration, can thumb their noses at the name
on
that boat.
Reagan's record, as it stands now according to the available historical
record, is not nearly as squeaky clean as the aircraft carrier's flight
deck. In fact, Reagan's record is atrocious if you're a fan of the
constitution, morale foreign policy, and international law. Reagan
oversaw
an administration of men whose first instincts were to deceive and
manipulate, to twist truth until it suited their parochial purposes, and
to
achieve these purposes without regard to the millions of people they
affected. Sound familiar?
Just look at Reagan's foreign policy. Reagan wanted to rollback
Communism,
and this end justified a whole rap sheet of means. In Central
America, for
instance, he supported a government in El Salvador whose Death Squads
"disappeared" thousands of its own people every year.
U.S. allies in
Guatemala carried out extermination campaigns on that country's
indigenous
population, murdering tens of thousands in the process. The U.S.
military
practically took over Honduras, a small nation that sold its soul for a
few
million dollars in aid.
Perhaps the most infamous case of Reaganite anticommunist fury occurred
against the Sandinistas. It was against these revolutionaries that
the
administration sicced the infamous Contras. Using Honduras as a
base camp,
the Contras waged terroristic guerrilla war in northern Nicaragua
against
peasants and government officials alike. Meanwhile, CIA
mercenaries mined
Nicaragua's harbors, bombed its ports, and trained the Contras in the
art of
political assassination.
Reagan oversaw these criminal activities, ignoring the details for the
sake
of his grand - yet myopic and simplistic - vision of the world.
"The national security of all the Americas is at stake in Central
America,"
Reagan admonished a joint session of Congress in the spring of 1983.
"If we
cannot defend ourselves there, we cannot expect to prevail elsewhere.
Our
credibility would collapse, our alliances would crumble, and the safety
of
our homeland would be put at jeopardy. We have a vital interest, a
moral
duty, and a solemn responsibility."
At the time, many in Congress, many Americans, and most of the world did
not
believe Reagan's hyperbole. It was as if Reagan and his crew saw a
completely different world than most other sane human beings. In a
secret
and now declassified Public Diplomacy Strategy Paper, administration
officials lamented that public opinion polls showed that "a larger
portion
of the public attributes unrest in Central America to poverty and lack
of
human rights, than to subversion from Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Soviet
Union."
"Abroad, most Western publics are even more negative in assessing
US actions
in the area," the report added. "In the non-aligned
world, there is almost
universal opposition to our position."
To "re-orient" the public's thinking - the get it on the same
paranoid wave
length as himself - Reagan oversaw the creation of undercover propaganda
agencies with innocent names like the Office of Public Diplomacy.
But for
all their persuasion and misinformation, these agencies could not hide
the
Reagan administration's violent and criminal actions. When
Iran-Contra
broke, Reagan and his crew were seen for what they were.
"The common ingredients of the Iran and Contra policies were
secrecy,
deception, and disdain for law," states Congress' report on the
scandal. "A
small group of senior officials believed that they alone knew what was
right."
The problem was, these senior officials were wrong. The people of
Central
America paid the costs. By the end of the 1980s, they were left to
pick up
the pieces from the wars that Reagan sponsored. Since then,
Central America
has returned to being the neglected, poverty-infested backwater that it
has
been since the Spaniards pillaged it centuries ago.
Reagan and his coterie of senior officials, on the other hand, are
celebrated. The onerous facts of the Iran-Contra scandal are left
in the
wake of the USS Ronald Reagan.
Worse still, the current administration follows a frighteningly similar
tact. It only makes sense considering many of the same
"senior officials"
hover in and around the Bush administration - Richard Perle, Admiral
John
Poindexter, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams - and they still believe they
are
doing what is right. And after all, the man whose orders they
first
followed - Ronald Reagan - is a living legend. Why not repeat what
he did?
The weight of this question for the average American may have been
summed up
best in the 1980s by Representative Gerry Studds, a Democrat from
Massachusetts. During one of the subcommittee meetings that
eventually led
to Iran-Contra, Studds had just finished listening to then Assistant
Secretary of State Elliot Abrams perjure himself. Abrams had just
been
denying that anti-Sandinista rebels were funded by the White House.
Representative Studds rose in response and declared:
"What is in question is whether this administration believes the
American
people have a right to know what is done abroad in their name, and
whether
Government officials have the right to ignore laws they don't
like."
Perhaps the better question for today is: can we afford to continue
idolizing and imitating a president who believed the American people had
no
right to know when government officials broke the law in their name?
Matthew L. Brodsky is a professional writer - with a
graduate education in U.S. history from the University of Georgia. MatthewBrodsky@informationclearinghouse.info
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