Thomas wrote:When people don't know, they judge. You're right Reagan and I both didn't know what was going on. Given this, he and I each made an incompletely informed judgment. His proved correct, mine incorrect. That's reason enough for me to admit that his judgment was better, whatever his motives for making it.
That's a reasonable statement. I should point out that i did not jump into this thread right away, because i neither consider Reagan to have been a genius nor a moron. I do think that his Presidency represents a bad time for the United States, for economic and foreign policy reasons. His administrations are more responsible for the strife in the middle east than are any other administrations, in my never humble opinion. I consider Reagan to have been an empty suit, however, and consider that it is highly likely that another conservative could have exploited the political disaffection of voters in the American South as easily as Reagan did. The fall of the Shah had, of course, already occurred, and i believe that would have been inevitable, even had it not occurred exactly when it did.
However, supporting the Iraqi Ba'ath regime against Iran, and the fiddle which sold spare parts to the Persians in order to get cash to support the Contras in Nicaragua was not necessarily going to have been the policy of any particular Republican administration just because they were Republican and conservative. Those policy decisions helped to create the contemporary middle eastern nightmare, and to continue the destabilization of Latin America. The 1973 CIA-supported coup against Allende served to encourage right-wing autocrats in Latin America, such as the military junta in Argentina--and that is something which certainly cannot be laid at Reagan's door. But Nicaragua, Panama and El Salvador certainly can be seen as the consequences of the policies of the Reagan administration.
Taken all in all, "Reaganomics" were exactly what the elder Bush said they were, voodoo economics. I consider that those economic polices, and the go-go Wall Street climate of the day helped to encourage the venality of corporate officers with which we still have to deal today. All sneers by conservative posters here taken aside, homelessness increased dramatically in the United States in the Reagan administration, and many of the "new" homeless were former home-owners, and families. The consequences of Reagan administration foreign policy are still with us today, and no good reason to assume that they contributed materially to the collapse of the Soviet Union--if they had any effect at all, it might have been to hasten that event, and i'm not even convinced of that.
