Ronald Reagan: Soft on terrorism

Scott Horton interviews Will Bunch about his book Tear Down This Myth. Bunch's most interesting contention is that, on terrorism-related issues such as torture, "collateral damage," and treating terrorism within the confines of the ordinary criminal justice system, Reagan was far to the left of the contemporary GOP (Bunch doesn't put it this way but, if his description of Reagan's positions is accurate, he was also to the left of Barack Obama on these issues).

5. Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture, and his Justice Department indicted and prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding. How can his views about torture be reconciled with the current Republican pro-torture dogma?

It’s important not to nominate Reagan for sainthood in the arena of human rights. His “Reagan Doctrine” in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure. That said, back on U.S. soil, Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.

But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

It’s almost tragic—when you go back to the very recent history of the 1980s—when you realize how seriously an American consensus on human rights and the power of our criminal-justice justice system has been trashed by the modern conservative movement. It’s going to take a long time to get that back—although the words that Reagan and his aides left behind could help America get past this.

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The Hoover Gambit: More Reviews In

For obvious reasons, including the one Rob and Dave mention below, pretty much uniformly negative. If health care reform tanks, the possibility that Obama "could be seen as a failed pre-emptive president in an overwhelmingly Republican era" is now a depressingly likely outcome.

It could, I suppose be argue that the cuts involved will be (in the context of federal outlays) trivial enough to make the Hoover reference unfair. But if the best case is that it's an irrelevant political gimmick, you have to consider the politics, which are pretty much a disaster. Hayes:

That's why this is so inexcusably insidious: because it uses the full power of the bully pulpit to reaffirm and endorse a kind of ignorance that the right-wing has spent years stoking, and in so doing further erodes what little conceptual and rhetorical foundation we have domestically for social democracy. It may be a head fake, the fine print may basically have a lot of loopholes, in which case the policy itself won't be terrible, but again it reinforces the enemy's narrative: that government spends too much on "programs," that defense and "security" spending doesn't count for the deficit and that times of economic misery and widespread unemployment the solution is fiscal austerity.

In addition to this, you have the fact that Democrats continue to play the sucker, believing that they have to "fiscally responsible" so that Republicans can take a better fiscal picture and piss it all away on upper-class cuts. The most charitable construction, reflected in a couple of Matt's scenarios, is that he's trying to expose "deficit hawks" on both sides of the aisle as frauds. The obvious problem is that the actions of Bayh and Conrad, and 6 years of united Republican rule, have already demonstrated that they're complete frauds. It doesn't matter. To the Fried Hiatts who care about this stuff being a "deficit hawk" is about inflicting pain on Democratic constituencies, not reducing the deficit. One more demonstration that many "deficit hawks" don't want to reduce agricultural subsidies won't solve anything.

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