A missed anniversary

Once again, I have had a finger-wagging from a regular reader of the blog and I deserve it. How could I forget the thirtieth anniversary of this speech?

 

 President Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on the subject of defence. Investors.com puts that seminal speech into perspective. President Obama has just returned from his Middle Eastern tour during which his "achievement" seems to have been to allow Israel and Turkey do what they wanted to do anyway and sort out their differences. Those two countries have been allies for a long time and are both more than a little worried about Iran.

Islamofascist Iran is now, according to the White House, a year away from nuclear arms, and the "Arab Spring" Obama's apologies helped spawn has turned Egypt from a U.S. ally into a possible foe under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Compare Obama's failure to realize the havoc he was wreaking to the astonishing prescience of Ronald Reagan.

Addressing the nation, he asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"

He knew missile defense was "a formidable technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century."

But by committing America to it, Soviet communism was a few years later relegated to "the ash-heap of history," as Reagan had promised the year before.

Read the whole article and weep.

Thirty years ago

The assassination attempt on President Reagan, March 30, 1981 on ABC News. It is worth watching till 4:10 when Frank Reynolds is handed the note with the news. It's also worth watching on to the point when Al Haig announces that he is now in charge. That faux pas was not forgotten or forgiven.



I have always maintained that by surviving the assassination attempt, Ronald Reagan broke Tecumseh's curse. After all, he did not die in office and neither did George W. Bush who was elected in 2000.

The best account and analysis of that momentous event is in John O'Sullivan's The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister about Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II, all three of whom survived assassination attempts.

Crisis? What crisis?

A few months ago I watched the film "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" with someone who knew of those events only by hearsay, being too young to remember. The film was not bad at all, with brilliant acting and a very clever script. There was no sympathy at all for the terrorists and for that one must be thankful nowadays.

It could have been better, though. In particular, it could have given a clearer idea of the international aspect of terrorism, of the role of the Soviet Union and East Germany and of how frightening the situation in the seventies was.

This has been something of a refrain of mine: yes, things are bad but are they really as bad as they were merely thirty years ago, not to mention seventy years ago? Yes, we need to deal with the problems we are facing, with many of them intractable and with very few allies, especially not in the Conservative Party. But are things really as bad as they were thirty years ago?

I was, therefore, delighted to read John Fund's article in the Wall Street Journal, which began with the paragraph:

You call this a crisis? Think back nearly 30 years ago. When Ronald Reagan took office the ­country's economy was in a shambles—inflation was running into the double digits, growth had ­stagnated and the top marginal tax rate was 70%. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, bristling with imperial designs and ­nuclear weapons, had recently invaded ­Afghanistan, installing a puppet regime, and Iran had ousted a pro-Western leader in favor of a ­fervently ­anti-American cleric. The White House tenure of Jimmy Carter, known for hand-wringing over ­"malaise" and a botched hostage-rescue mission, had led scholars to conclude that the American presidency, as an institution, was too weak to govern in the ­modern world.

Things were even worse over on this side of the Pond when just over thirty years ago, in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Most of us had no idea what she really stood for, unlike Americans who, roughly speaking, knew about Reagan's ideology.

Incidentally, the best book on that period remains John O'Sullivan's "The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister". (Full disclosure: John is a very good friend of mine. But the book is still excellent and astonishingly exciting.)

The article is really a review of a new and very interesting sounding book about President Reagan. Both the book and the review are fair and admiring of the man's achievements. But, as John Fund says, Reagan and America with him faced two enemies: the Soviet Union and big government. The first proved to be weaker and was defeated. The second stands still and getting stronger under President Obama.

The same can be said here. Maybe the economic ideas of the free market did become acceptable by all (though at a time when banks have been nationalized and railways re-nationalized, that argument sounds a little weak) but the notion that government is not the solution but the problem is little favoured.

None of the main political parties accept it, none of the main-stream media, very few of the opinion formers and only a small proportion of the population, though the last of these is growing. We have a long way to go.

Goodness, I miss President Reagan

Daily am I reminded of his brilliant summary of political life that the nine most frightening words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help".

No need for military confrontation

The response of many to suggestions that President Obama could have been just a teensy-weensy bit more supportive of the anti-Mullah movement in Iran was the usual one of "what, you want America to invade Iran". Well, no. There are many points between vacillating the way the President of no vision has done and actual invasion, which is not being planned, would not be a good idea and, incidentally, was not planned under President Bush either, despite endless reports of people "in the know".

The Wall Street Journal reminds its readers of the way President Reagan managed to help Poland and the independent trade union Solidarność. It made a great deal of difference and, as we know, helped to bring down Communism in Eastern Europe without an invasion.

Of course, that needed a leader of vision. Sadly, it does not look like the United States has one of those at the moment.

Read the article in full.