Gorbachev

Today is the funeral of Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States. For the past week all I've heard is how he "won" the Cold War, but I do beg to differ. I think that one can talk about many things with that period of history, but for Reagan to get the credit for this is a bit ingenuous. When Lech Walesa and his fellow union members were striking in Gdansk they had no illusions that the United States would help them. When the poets, playwrights and musicians of Prague were risking their lives for jazz and going to jail they were not thinking of Ronald Reagan. They were thinking about their own integrity. The United States had little to do with the forces that changed the Eastern Block from the inside.

I don't think Reagan can fairly be described as one who was all that interested in freedom for anyone but Americans, and one must remember that if it were up to President Reagan Nelson Mandela would have died in jail, Sadaam Hussein would have killed all the Kurds and a junta would still be running Argentina. He might have wanted to defeat the Soviet Union, but he was no friend of freedom around the world. We are not only cleaning up his mess still today, but criminals like Elliot Abrams are back in the White House despite their convictions, as are such dubious characters like Paul Wolfowitz. If you compare Reagan to Willy Brandt, Nelson Madela, Charles DeGaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower or even Bill Clinton you see exactly how cruel and unproductive he was in making a better world. He was a kinder, gentler Kissinger.

When you look back the figure who stands out is Gorbachev, who by any estimation ended generations of fear and, through a fundamental sense of justice and decency, ended a terrible and evil division of the world. While there are some who say that the arms buildup drove him to it the fact is that the people of the Warsaw Pact who grew up in the brief bright period of the Kruschev era and who experienced the Prague Spring wanted change from within. Gorbachev, one of the most decent and idealistic politicians of our time, brought the horror to an end because he believed in humanity, not because he feared the United States. Keep in mind Star Wars still doesn't work, and no matter what Reagan said, you cannot win a nuclear war. We didn't win. It's enough we didn't lose.