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Giving Reagan any credit for the end of the Cold War is dubious at best. During the four years of his administration prior to the ascendancy of Gorbachev, nothing happened. His sabre-rattling solidified Soviet hatred of the West during those years, and only his willingness to talk about economic development corrected that.
That said, his economic development policies pursued elsewhere were horrible, and we're still paying that price.
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The terrible legacy of the Reagan years
* David Aaronovitch
In some crude forms of therapy the patient is confronted with a re-enactment of the trauma that caused his collapse. Even so, I don't think I'll be watching Ronald Reagan's state funeral as Margaret Thatcher's taped tribute is played. It'll be too painful. I'll go and sit on broken glass for a while instead.
That, for me, was a bad decade - a decade in which rightwing precepts were dominant and the left was in full and abject retreat. But perhaps, along with others, I should reassess the Reagan legacy. If Gerhard Schröder and Mikhail Gorbachev can say what a fabulous contribution the old actor made to freedom, it may be time to forget jokes like, "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you that I have signed legislation to outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
Because Reagan didn't start bombing in five minutes. He didn't even actually build Star Wars. Following the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles, he then - quite unexpectedly - engaged in a process of arms limitation and tension reduction that made it safe for Gorbachev to pursue a reform programme in the Soviet Union. That's not enough to get him chiselled into Mount Rushmore, but it's a damn sight more than I gave him credit for at the time.
What isn't so easy to forgive is the Reagan Doctrine, sometimes known as Third World Rollback. Rollback was the American end of the proxy war fought between the two superpowers for power and influence in the developing world. The basis was childishly simple: my enemy's enemy is my friend.
To that end the Reagan administration insisted on recognising the deposed Khmer Rouge government in exile at the UN, mostly because it was the pro-Soviet Vietnamese that had done the deposing. This recognition helped maintain a civil war in which many Cambodians were killed and many thousands of landmines were laid.
In Central America the doctrine required supporting the "contra" rebels in Nicaragua, and backing for the Guatemalan government which - during the Reagan era - may have killed more than 100,000 Mayan Indians. Reagan described the contras as being like America's "founding fathers" and Guatemala's hard man, Rios Montt, as "a man of great personal integrity".
Over the Atlantic and down a bit, and we have Reagan welcoming Jonas Savimbi of the Unita organisation to the White House and speaking of his murderous outfit in Angola winning "a victory that electrifies the world and brings great sympathy and assistance from other nations to those struggling for freedom". Actually what Savimbi was doing was prolonging a civil war in which the UN estimates that 300,000 children died directly or indirectly during the Reagan years, and Angola was covered in landmines. Human Rights Watch reports that Unita's indiscriminate use of landmines, caused there to be more than 15,000 amputees in the country by 1988, ranking the country alongside Afghanistan and Cambodia in the league of blown-off limbs.
Speaking of Afghanistan, the administration responded to the Soviet presence by arming and organising religious zealots to harass and defeat them. When the Soviets withdrew, the Americans lost interest. The Afghans were left with the zealots and the landmines.
Then there was Iraq. This time it was more complicated, because of the war with Iran. The Soviet Union had resumed arms shipments to Saddam Hussein in 1981, sending in 1,200 military advisers and planning to sell him SS12 missiles with a range of 800km, despite his persecution of Iraq's communists. Reagan responded by sending out Donald Rumsfeld, his special Middle East envoy, by taking Iraq off the list of states declared by the state department to be sponsoring terrorism - despite the presence in Baghdad of Abu Nidal - and by selling Saddam 60 Hughes helicopters that could be adapted for anti-tank use.
David Mack, a diplomat who went on the Baghdad mission, is quoted by the author Con Coughlin as recalling that, "We wanted to build a Cairo-Amman-Baghdad axis that would drive (the pro-Soviet) President Assad crazy". Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, complained to the British ambassador that, "We get a far better hearing from the US than from the UK." That sits badly with this week's eulogies.
The Reagan years were the years, perhaps, in which the cold war was won, and that is obviously good. He wasn't the missile-mad cowboy of cartoons, and those of us who thought otherwise were wrong. But the Reagan presidency of 1981-89 was also when the dragon's teeth of the present were sown. Reagan's legacy to the world may be the fallen wall, but it is also the third-world landmine. |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jun/08/usa.comment
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