Like Nixon with Thieu, Reagan's team appears to have offered the Iranians a better deal than Carter did, in this case, promises of military hardware via Israel that Iran needed for its conflict with neighboring Iraq.
Failing to win the hostages' release, Carter saw his reelection hopes dashed. With the first anniversary of the humiliating hostage-taking coming on the day of the election, the polls showed a suddenly widening lead for Reagan who coasted to an easy victory. The hostages were finally released immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
(As with the Nixon-Vietnam scheme, governing Democrats recoiled at the idea of holding the Republicans accountable even when extensive evidence of Reagan's Iran contacts came to light in the last half of the 1980s and the early 1990s. For "the good of the country," Democrats again swept the evidence under the rug.) [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Reagan's election marked another turning point in American history, and it was not a positive one. President Carter, for all his shortcomings, had begun addressing some of the big problems confronting the United States, including the need for alternative energy sources, Middle East peace, and human rights as a core value in U.S. foreign policy.
Reagan, however, countered with a "don't worry, be happy" approach to the future. Tax cuts would swell revenues; no need to worry about your gas-guzzlers; government was the problem, not the rapidly expanding power of multinational corporations; human rights were for sissies.
In selling his policies, Reagan also was aided by a rapidly expanding right-wing news media that was bankrolled to challenge the remnants of the Watergate-era press corps. Meanwhile, the Left largely abandoned the goal of having a national media infrastructure. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Left's Media Miscalculation."]
Ugly Americans
Despite the harm that Reagan's economic policies did to the United States corporations accelerating the shipping of jobs overseas, unions broken, Carter's solar panels ripped from the White House roof perhaps Reagan's most destructive actions came in his global strategies.
Reagan unleashed right-wing "death squads" in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua killing tens of thousands. To challenge the Soviet Union, he funded Islamist radicals in Afghanistan who would become the backbone of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He acquiesced to Pakistan's building of nuclear bombs, perhaps today's greatest threat to world security.
To justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars more on U.S. military hardware, Reagan also oversaw the politicization of the CIA's analytical division so it would exaggerate the Soviet threat in the 1980s. Two decades later, that perversion of U.S. intelligence would help justify the invasion of Iraq with "fixed" analytical reports about non-existent WMDs.
In terms of government personnel, Reagan credentialed a young group of intellectuals and ideologues who became known as the neoconservatives. To justify U.S. interventions abroad, these neocons felt justified in using propaganda techniques to manipulate the American people, herding them like cattle in a desired direction. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Many on the American Left who had abandoned Jimmy Carter were aghast at what Reagan did, especially the atrocities in Central America. But the blame was put mostly on the hapless ex-President and the governing Democrats. There was very little soul-searching on the Left, which viewed itself as essentially blameless for the catastrophes that the Reagan years wrought.
The Clinton Years
The Reagan excesses, especially the mirage of tax cuts producing extra revenue and the myth that the United States didn't need an industrial base, created so much economic pain by 1992 that Bill Clinton was able to exploit a split in the conservative vote between President George H.W. Bush and billionaire Ross Perot and slip into the White House.
Clinton's election also came at a time when evidence was finally pouring in regarding political and national security crimes of the early Reagan years, including the Reagan campaign's arms-for-hostages deals with Iran in both 1980 and later with the Iran-Contra Affair and Reagan's secret orders to help arm Iran's enemies in Iraq.
In late 1992, so much new evidence of Republican guilt was arriving at a House task force investigating the 1980 hostage crisis that chief counsel Lawrence Barcella said he urged the chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, to extend the inquiry for a few more months, but Hamilton declined citing political difficulties.
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