In case you missed it: Ron Reagan Jr. (and Chris Matthews) vs. neocon Frank Gaffney

October 24, 2009 · Posted in Foreign policy, Television

Fresh off his black tie fete for our four times draft deferred, hawkish former vice president, Dick Cheney, and his former deputy, the still-convicted Scooter Libby, (in which Dick Cheney accused the Obama administration of “dithering” on Afghanistan,) Frank Gaffney tried to give as good as he got on “Hardball” yesterday, even telling the son of the president Gaffney purportedly idolizes that Ron Reagan Jr’s father “would be ashamed” of him. But in this clip, watch as Chris Matthews serves him up, and Ron Reagan proves that he really is the son and namesake of America’s John Wayne president:

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Of course, behind the above thumping is the very sobering fact that Mr. Gaffney was among a coterie of neoconservatives who served George W. Bush that pre-cooked meal that was the Iraq war, costing more than 4,000 American servicemen and women their lives, not to mention hundreds of allied troops and countless thousands of Iraqis. Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, essentially silenced the neocons, most of whom worked for his administration in some capacity, mostly nestled within the Department of Defense, because they couldn’t stop themselves pushing for him to go to war — and that would be thermonuclear war — with the Soviet Union. From a New York Times article called “How Reagan Beat the Neocons”:

In 1985, Mr. Reagan sent a long handwritten letter to Mikhail Gorbachev assuring him that he was prepared ”to cooperate in any reasonable way to facilitate such a withdrawal” of the Soviets from Afghanistan. ”Neither of us,” he added, ”wants to see offensive weapons, particularly weapons of mass destruction, deployed in space.” Mr. Reagan eagerly sought to work with Mr. Gorbachev to rid the world of such weapons and to help the Soviet Union effect peaceful change in Eastern Europe.

This offer was far from the position taken by the neoconservative advisers who now serve under Mr. Bush. Twenty years ago in the Reagan White House, they saw no possibility for such change, and indeed many of them subscribed to the theory of ”totalitarianism” as unchangeable and irreversible. Mr. Reagan was also informed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a possible pre-emptive attack on the United States. This alarmist position was taken by Team B, formed in response to the more prudently analytical position of the C.I.A. and then composed of several members of the present Bush administration. The team was headed by Richard Pipes, the Russian historian at Harvard, whose stance was summed up in the title of one of his articles: ”Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War.”

Not only did the neocons oppose Mr. Reagan’s efforts at rapprochement, they also argued against engaging in personal diplomacy with Soviet leaders. Advisers like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, now steering our foreign policy, held that America must escalate to achieve ”nuclear dominance” and that we could only deal from a ”strategy of strength.” Mr. Reagan believed in a strong military, but to reassure the Soviet Union that America had no aggressive intentions, he reminded Leonid Brezhnev of just the opposite. From 1945 to 1949, the United States was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb, and yet, Mr. Reagan emphasized to Mr. Brezhnev, no threat was made to use the bomb to win concessions from the Soviet Union.

The Star Wars missile defense system advocated by Mr. Reagan is often regarded as the final nail in the coffin of communism, as a military system that the Soviets could not afford and only fear. The first assumption was right, the second dubious. Margaret Thatcher, who urged Mr. Reagan to regard Mr. Gorbachev as ”a man we can work with,” also gave him more blunt advice on Star Wars: ”I’m a chemist; I know it won’t work.” Like Mrs. Thatcher, Soviet scientists regarded it as a fantasy, and thus they were hardly impressed with Mr. Reagan’s offer to share it with them once it was perfected. (It still hasn’t been, nearly two decades later.)

Those advisers in the Bush administration who regard themselves as Reaganites ought to remember that Mr. Reagan ceased heeding their advice. According to George Shultz’s memoir, ”Turmoil and Triumph,” Mr. Reagan would become uneasy when his hawkish advisers entered the Oval Office. In his own memoir, ”An American Life,” Mr. Reagan ridiculed the ”macabre jargon” of warheads, I.C.B.M.’s, kill ratios and ”throw weights,” the payload capacity of long-range missiles. The president thought their figures sounded like ”baseball scores” and dismissed his pesky advisers. Mr. Reagan rejected the neocons; George W. Bush stands by them no matter what.

It seems that Mr. Gaffney has a bit of a short memory.

Meanwhile: the White House pushes back on Cheney. … Biden chimes in with a hearty “who cares?” And David Corn asks “why is Dick Cheney helping Barack Obama?” Also: a retired general weighs in, calling Cheney an “incompetent war fighter.” Ouch.

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