I was going to take time to respond to many of the major editorials out there by neo-conservatives on what the United States should do about Iran. It is a rather inane dialogue, where if you say ‘freedom and democracy’ enough times, the Ayatollah gets scared and doesn’t suppress his people. I would say the Republicans don’t remember Hungary in 1956, where we did some rather idiotic hope-raising, leading to mass slaughter. I would say more, Matt Duss at American Prospect, however, does it for me and better:
In an interview with Radio Free America, Sen. John McCain responded to fellow Republican Sen. Richard Lugar’s suggestion that President Obama shouldn’t get involved in the disputed election by saying, "I’m sure that this was the same comment that was made when President Reagan went to Berlin and said, ‘Take down this wall. [sic]‘ I’ve seen this movie before. America stands for freedom, for democracy."
Indeed, we’ve all seen this movie before. It’s the one where conservatives deploy a potted history of the Cold War — in which Reagan spoke and the walls came tumbling down — to cast international politics as a zero-sum contest between good and evil, and to cow progressives into a more aggressive rhetorical posture toward America’s adversary of the moment. It is usually hidden under the guise of "solidarity with captive peoples" and absent any genuine consideration of the practical effects on the peoples concerned.
Needless to say, this comic book version of history leaves out an enormous amount. What’s missing is not only U.S. Cold War policy before Reagan (in which Americans of both parties moved in fits and starts to both contain and engage the Soviet Union) but also some of the more inconvenient aspects of Reagan’s own presidency — such as his silence over U.S. ally Saddam Hussein’s various acts of mass murder, his conversion to the cause of arms control and outreach to Gorbachev (for which he was condemned by neoconservatives as a "traitor to anti-Communism"), and, of course, his trading of arms to Iran and diversion of the proceeds to support the Nicaraguan Contras.
My only addition to this as follows: does anybody think American foreign policy worked in the last eight years? If so, why are we listening to the people that wrote the policy?
