Tag Archives: Reagan

The Ash Heap Of History

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Today, Democrat conventional wisdom is that the USSR was going to inevitably collapse, and that everyone – well, every Democrat – always knew it.

It’s not true, of course:

Forty years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave one of his greatest speeches – but unlike “A Time for Choosing“, or the Brandenburg Gate, or Point du Hoc or Christmas 1981, not one of his most widely heralded or remembered ones.

It was his speech to the British Parliament 40 years ago today, in which he predicted, and called for, the collapse of Communism.

Here it is:

And if Democrats were right, this would have followed by a wave of “Well, no, duh” by the political and cultural left of the day.

But, well, no:

After Reagan’s speech at Westminster, historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union — elite thinkers in American higher education — in a book titled “After Brezhnev.”Their conclusion: Any thought of winning the Cold War was a fantasy. “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said in an interview. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.”

Of course, Reagan was right:

Within a decade — on Christmas Day, 1991 — Mikhail Gorbachev announced the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union. The 40-year-old Cold War came to a peaceful end because American democratic capitalism had laid bare the economic, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy of Soviet communism. As Reagan told an adviser when asked about his policy toward the Soviet Union: “We win, they lose.”

But now is not a time for nostalgia.

Forty years ago, the cancer destroying freedom was an external enemy.

Today the enemy – the same enemy, if you think about it – is here, within our borders, at our Capitol.

Forty years ago, the same egghead class that is canceling conservatives on campus was poo-poohing the thought that Communism would ever go away.

We need another leader – or group off leaders – who can envision eradicating the cancer that is eating life, prosperity…freedom, from within, just as certainly as the Soviets did (if with less bloodshed – so far), and lead toward that goal with the same exuberance and confidence.

Happy Reagan’s Birthday!

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Ronald Reagan – by far the greatest president of my lifetime – would be 103 today. 

I’ll be doing my usual Reagan’s Birthday celebration; special dinner, talking with the kids (and, soon, granddaughter Watermelon, who will be old enough to learn the basics before too terribly long), jelly beans at the office. 

Of course, Reagan’s Birthday is more than just a fun holiday, commemorating one of the great men of Western Civilization, a man whose brief ascendancy may have bought the United States a few more decades of prosperity – indeed, existence in its current form – than it had any right to expect 35 years ago. 

No – there are a lot of people out there trying to steal Reagan’s legacy, to pervert it into something it wasn’t, to lie and deceive for craven and low purposes. 

And I’m here to steal Reagan’s legacy back. The lies are all over the place; the answers, the scathing debunquements, are harder to find. 

But not on this blog. 

“Reagan spent a lot of money!”:  Read your Constitution.  Presidents don’t spend money.  The House of Representatives does.  Tip O’Neil spent money like a meth hooker with a stolen Gold Card.  Yes, Reagan’s primary priority – the downfall of Communism – cost money, and a lot of it.  That spending was supposed to be met with cuts to entitlements.  Congress – which, for the first 3/4 of Reagan’s time in DC was entirely controlled by spendthrift Democrats – insisted on keeping the entitlement gravy train flowing.  Presidents aren’t dictators (although Barack Obama seems to have expressed his intention to test that thesis in his last State of the Union); compromises were made. 

But economist James Lindeman of the Heritage Foundation estimated that Reagan’s defense spending paid for itself, with interest, in the nineties; freed of a Soviet Union, America’s economy de-militarized, freeing up immense capital and capacity for civilian production.  The technology that went into making the sonar on the Los Angeles class submarines a top-secret wonder of the world in 1982 was turned into making cell phones smaller, lighter, more capable and downright cheap by 1997.  Bill Clinton’s boom economy was entirely the result of Republican policy; Reagan made the “peace dividend” possible, and Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Congress prevented Bill Clinton from spending it all on Hillarycare. 

“Reagan was teh dum!”:  This notion has been shredded by waves of scholars. 

Of course, the source of that slander was something more toxic than the slander itself.  Reagan was a regular, middle-class American with a degree from a humble, obscure midwestern college, who’d worked his way up through several fields – radio, acting, public relations and then politics – without any of the academic fripperies that the elite has come to regard as the price of entry to respectable success – degrees, and more degrees, from institutions whose main claim to fame is their claim to fame. 

Reagan had none of that.  He had vision, talent, and hard work – the same things the vast majority of Americans bring to the table. 

 

And that – today, when our academy has turned into a self-sustaining parasite class (not to knock any particular members of the academy who may be friends and occasional radio co-hosts of mine), that’s an example all Americans need.

“Reagan raised taxes”:  Yes, he did.  Eventually.  But not until the real work was done, and much less than he cut them in the first place. 

We talked about this a couple years ago.  Reagan’s tax cuts came early in his Administration, when the economy was, by some measures, worse than it was in 2007.  He slashed taxes – and (unlike the 2007 recession) the economy came storming back. 

The “tax hikes” came in his second term; they were a result of Tip O’Neil and the Democrat Congress reneging on a deal with Reagan.  They were less than 1/4 of the size of the cuts and, most importantly, they happened when the economy was booming.  Could the economy have boomed more without the hikes?  Absolutely.  But raising taxes when the economy is booming isn’t quite as blazingly stupid as raising them when the economy is crippled. 

There truly is no compararison. 

“The Soviet Union would have collapsed on its own”:  That’s one of those things that everyone agreed about – in about 1993.  Of course, reading those same ‘experts’ in the seventies and eighties was quite another story; almost to a person (as showed by Dinesh D’Souza in his essential Reagan bio,Reagan:  How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary President, they agreed in the seventies, the eighties, and even into the early nineties that the Soviet Union and the “Second World” it led were here to stay.  Many believed, on an intellectual level, that the USSR would one day collapse.  Not a one of them went on the record claiming it’d be in any of their lifetimes, to say nothing of “within a decade of Reagan’s inaugural”. 

But that’s history.  For me, it was very personal.  I grew up about 30 miles from the nearest first strike nuclear target, a Minuteman III silo, in the middle of a state with 329 more of them; missiles were almost as dense as oil wells, and covered much more of the state. 

And through most of my teens and twenties, I wondered – what would be the purpose of having children in a world that could get vaporized in half an hour? 

And having that threat ebb – having the bombers roll back from standby, having the Armageddon Clock back off a few minutes, moving the hammer back to half-cocked – answered that question for me; “don’t worry; life looks pretty likely to go on for the foreseeable future”. 

So my response to people knocking Reagan is the same as it ever was – polite contempt for their intellectual vapidity.  But for stealing Reagan’s legacy?  Perverting the facts?  Trying to forcibly bugger history? 

For that, there is no mercy. 

(Which is what you’ll find out if you waste space in my comment section disagreeing with any of the above.  While this blog tries to foster a lively discussion, on this issue there will be no dissent.  It’s my blog and I’ll censor if I want to).

Grenada

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Today is the 26th anniversary of the invasion of Grenada.

The story itself is both mundane and, in a sense, not all that relevant:

Problems between the US and the Caribbean nation began in 1979 (while the Cold War was still in effect) when a bloodless coup placed the pro-Marxist Maurice Bishop as the Prime Minister, which led to strengthened ties between Grenada and communist nations like Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Bishop was eventually murdered in October of 1983 during a power struggle with hard-liners in his own movement, creating a breakdown in civil order that threatened the lives of American medical students who were living on the island.

Of course, the real issue was with the new landlords; with the Marxists came Cuban and Soviet money, equipment and help, much of which went into expanding Grenada’s main airport – which, according to the intelligence of the day, were intended for Soviet patrol planes.

Which brought up quite a few sensitive issues. Jimmy Carter had lost a fair amount of political capital with his fairly impotent reponse to the revelation that a Soviet infantry brigade had gotten stationed in Cuba.

The Reagan Administration was also aware that international law and custom – for example, the “Monroe Doctrine” – was a lot like copyright and trademark law; if you didn’t defend your brand, the courts’d assume you had let the whole thing lapse.

And in the wake of the Bishop murder and the overthrow of the sitting government, anarchy reigned on the island; the government instituted a “shoot on sight” curfew which was an obvious threat to the 800 American medical students attending school on the island.

Between the violence, the anarchy, the communists and their long-standing record of expansionism in the region brought not a few Caribbean governments to consult with Reagan.

Those were the motivations. The media and Reagan’s critics later claimed that the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, two days earlier, was a motivation too. However, all the relevant decisions had been made, and some of the troops and ships were already underway for the invasion when the news of the bombing impacted.

And so on October 25, the invasion went ahead. Marines landed along the beaches; the Rangers parachuted in to seize the airfields. SEALs and Deltas attempted surgical strikes against key Grenadian leaders.

It would seem to have been Goliath versus David, in many ways; over 7,000 US ground troops, backed by thousands and thousands more in the air and at sea, went ashore to tackle about 1,500 Grenadian militia and 700 Cuban military engineers.

But the fog of war, and some grave deficiencies in the US military, caused all sorts of problems. Boats carrying SEALs flipped in rough seas, killing several commandos even before they got into action.  Airborne Rangers dropped on the airfield got pinned down and had to fight a vicious pitched battle.  Delta commandos ran into stiff resistance.  It took US troops – Marines and a big chunk of the 82nd Airborne Division – weeks to finally mop up the island.

Since then, the left and many of Reagan’s critics have sought to portray Grenada as a trivial sideshow at best, a joke at worst.  But the battle led to three epochal changes.

The most trivial was the sense that the US was starting to shed the legacy of Vietnam and Desert One – that the US had the nerve to do what it needed to to safeguard its interests.  Along with the stiff (but largely unpublicized) reaction to Iran’s provocations in the Gulf that happened at about the same time, and the Gulf of Sidra incident and the bombing of Libya that happened three years later, the US got the sense that we were no longer a bunch of beaten dogs.  America got its confidence back.

But there were many effects that ran much deeper.  It had long-lasting, near-immediate (in bureaucratic terms) effects on the US military.  Grenada, its operational success notwithstanding, was not an especially successful operation.  It was marred by faulty intelligence on the one hand, and entrenched interservice rivalries on the other.  Coming hot on the heels of several other US military failures – Beirut, Desert One, the Mayaguez incident and Vietnam – Grenada was the tipping point that led to sweeping, comprehensive reforms of the US military.  These reforms led eventually to the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, which led to a major reorganization of the US military, whose major effect was to force the armed forces to operate more as a joint entity rather than four competing sets of interests.

Most important of all?  Notwithstanding the various critics who tried to paint the operation as a trifling diversion, the USSR got the message.  Soviet foreign minister Anatolii Dobrynin, as related in Dinesh D’Souza’s biography of Reagan, recounted after the fall of the USSR that the Grenada set the Politburo back on its heels.  Accustomed to nearly a decade of post-Vietnam demoralization and Carter-era dithering, Grenada served notice to the Soviets that the day of America the facile pushover had ended.

Anyway – kudos to all you Grenada veterans in the audience.