March 4, 2006
What Would Reagan Do?
By Richard Reeves
LOS ANGELES -- "Don't you think that the criticism President
Bush is receiving over Iraq is the same as what they were saying
about Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union? Everyone was saying
Reagan couldn't pull it off, but he did."
That question,
almost word for word, has ended almost all of the conversations
I have had with conservative talk show hosts as I criss-crossed
the country these past weeks promoting (or defending) my book,
"President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination." It was
the last question from Sean Hannity of Fox News' "Hannity
and Colmes" on my first day in New York, and it was the last
or next-to-last one from Matt Gerson of "Person to Person"
last Monday in Phoenix.
My answer
was always, "No." If I was feeling good, I'd say that
I had not noticed a Mikhail Gorbachev of the Mideast. If I was
tired, I'd say Reagan never invaded and occupied Russia or any
part of the Soviet Union. If I was pushed, I'd say that Reagan
was a remarkably cautious man when it came to using military force.
He greatly preferred talking tough to get his way, without a shot
being fired.
"Reagan,"
the name, the icon, the nucleus of modern conservatism, has become
the last line of defense for those who still think Iraq is going
well. He is for many Americans -- though George W. Bush is not
one of them -- still the president, as Franklin D. Roosevelt was
president for many liberals for decades after his death.
That Reagan,
the one still running the country, is a myth, of course. As was
FDR. In life, President Reagan was a man who understood that words
are often more effective than deeds, a man who knew when and how
to compromise, a man who knew how to ignore provocation, a man
who knew how to declare victory. He built up the military, doubled
the Pentagon budget and lost fewer than one thousand American
fighting men and women in eight years -- the majority of them
in accidents -- years in which the United States emerged as the
single military, economic and moral superpower in the world.
He made horrendous
mistakes in military-political situations, particularly in Lebanon,
Iran and Central America, but looking back, he went a long way
toward winning the big one, the Cold War, without the use of troops.
Would Reagan
go into Iraq expecting to win on the cheap as American soldiers
were pelted with flowers and candy? I don't think so. He was a
quick-strike guy: fly planes across the world to scare the hell
out of Col. Gadhafi in Libya, knock out some Iranian oil platforms,
take Grenada (with 19 American deaths) and then get out of there.
The Grenada
exercise in 1983 was a Reagan classic. Low military risk, high
political gain to remove an annoying little Marxist government.
Even then, he wanted to take no chances. When the Joint Chiefs
of Staff briefed him on the exercise, he seemed to be listening
until at the end of the meeting, he told them to double the number
of troops they had planned to use. "Why?" asked the
chairman of the chiefs.
"Because
if Jimmy Carter had 18 helicopters instead of nine in Desert One"
-- the mission to free American hostages in Iran -- "you'd
be briefing him now instead of me."
Reagan made
mistakes, plenty of them. But he learned from them. His worst
foreign policy blunder may have been a reckless aside in a 1983
press conference saying the mission of U.S. Marines in Lebanon,
part of a multinational peackekeeping force, was to train the
official Lebanese army. Actually, they were there, stationed at
the Beirut airport, to keep Muslims and Israelis apart.
The Lebanese
army was essentially Christian, enemies of the Shiite Muslims
living in the slums around the airport. "America is the enemy"
began to blare from the mosques. On the night of Oct. 23, 1983,
a suicide bomber drove a truck into the lobby of the Marine barracks,
set off a huge explosion and killed 241 Marines.
Reagan's
response was to talk tough about staying the course, then "redeploy"
the Marines -- safely onto American ships in the Mediterranean.
Cut and run.
"What
would Reagan have done after 9/11?" That was another regular
question. My answer was that he would have focused American resources,
not foreign irregulars, to track down Osama bin Laden, as he tracked
Gadhafi. Then he would declare victory and get on with life.
Go into Iraq?
With half the troops needed? With a shifting, contradictory mission?
Maybe. But I doubt it. What was the point? What is the point now?
Do what Reagan would have done if he were foolish enough to go
in in the first place: Redeploy the troops, cut and run.
Copyright
2006 Universal Press Syndicate
