Lauck, Reagan, and Hollywood Foreign Policy

I'm working my way through Jon Lauck's Daschle v. Thune while rocking the young 'un to sleep. (No review from the young 'un yet... although she appears to stay awake longer and and follow along when I bring Jon to the rocking chair -- policy debaters beware!)

Last night I hit Chapter 5, "The Politics of Association and Memory." One thesis of the chapter is that Daschle suffered while Thune and Bush benefited from the wave of positive memories generated by President Reagan's death -- just a day before the 60th anniversary of D-Day, Lauck notes, suggesting a synergy between World War II moral nostalgia and patriotic feeling about our victory in the Cold War.

The World War II commemorations and the Reagan funeral slowed the withering barrage of bad news from Iraq, especially the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal. They also conjured memories of remaking totalitarian states into functional, prosperous republics and freeing nations once held in bondage during a month when the United States prepared to transfer sovereignty to a new Iraqi government. Even before the transfer, president Bush touted the organization of political parties and courts of law, the establishment of a new currency, the opening of new businesses, the opening of schools and hospitals, and the publication of 170 newspapers in iraq. The memory of Reagan and his legacy bolstered support for the effort to build the new Iraq. [Lauck, pp. 98-99].

Lauck got me thinking: is Bush's nation-building in Iraq really an expression of the Reagan legacy? Did Reagan's foreign policy look anything like Bush's?

Not really. Reagan's cowboy foreign policy was a lot more Hollywood hat than blood-and-guts cattle (what is that, three metaphors mixed?). In his eight years, Reagan's one big military adventure was the 1983 invasion of Grenada, a island the size of Martha's Vineyard. Beating 1200 Grenadian soldiers, 780 Cubans (mostly military engineers), and a surprise (and surely surprised) guest cast of about 100 Commie extras from the USSR, North Korea, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Libya took a week and cost 18 American soldiers' lives.

The Grenada invasion came just days after the US lost 241 servicemen in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, where Reagan had committed troops as part of an international peacekeeping force. After insisting that it was vital to keep an American military force in Lebanon, Reagan pulled US troops out of Lebanon in February 1984*. After that, Reagan refrained from any direct military action beyond relative pinpricks like the airstrikes on Libya, minor fracases that played more like Top Gun or Iron Eagle than The Longest Day. He focused on wars by proxy, finding tricky ways to subvert Congress's will with that nutty arms-hostages-Iranian money-Contras scheme (think an Ocean's Eleven prequel, with George Clooney as Oliver North!). Reagan trained and paid Osama bin Laden and helped Saddam Hussein do our fighting against Commies and ayatollahs for us so our troops wouldn't have to fight and die in Afghanistan and Iraq... oh, oops.

As for the real enemy, the Soviets (and yes, they were a real enemy, whom America needed to beat), Reagan never fired a shot. Rather, Reagan won the Cold War with rhetoric, diplomacy, and the spectacular Star Wars bluff. He put the Soviets on alert by calling them an "evil empire." He rallied popular support on both sides of the Iron Curtain by calling on Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." At the same time, he met personally with Gorbachev every year of his second term, keeping lines of communication open. Even in diplomacy, though, Reagan drove the Soviets batty with his SDI proposal, a bigger bluff than Captain Kirk's Corbomite Maneuver. Reagan sold the bluff, rejecting a breakthrough arms reduction deal at Reykjavik in 1986 just because the Soviets insisted on restrictions on SDI, a Buck Rogers technology we still haven't successfully deployed two decades later.

(Of course, some argue Reagan's tough-guy rhetoric didn't do jack to send the Soviet Union into collapse. Triumphalists and fatalists, have at it.)

If, as Lauck suggests, folks drew positive associations between Reagan and GW Bush in foreign policy, their judgment was clouded by funereal emotion. The foreign policies of the 40th and 43rd Presidents may share "America against the evildoers" rhetoric, but in execution, they are nothing alike. Reagan had no stomach for nation-building or big, bloody wars. He appears to have liked his military adventures like his movies: quick, clean, relatively painless, with few if any of the heroes (the Americans in the white hats) getting hurt.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing. There are a few hundred South Dakota soldiers and their families who might not mind a President who could win a war with words and guile.

* Typing Update: I originally typed "2004." See Comment #1 below from an eagle-eyed reader who caught my brain-fart.