IN 1983, THE U.S. INVADED THE ISLAND OF GRENADA
After Grenada, Reagan proudly announced, "Our days of weakness are over. Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall. " Even the sting of humiliation in Vietnam had been alleviated. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, he claimed, had been "denied permission to win." "We didn't lose the war," he insisted. "When the war was all over and we'd come home -----that's when the war was lost." In December 1988, a National Defense Commission report concluded, "Our failure in Vietnam still casts a shadow over U.S. intervention anywhere."
The U.S. attempt to avenge the killing of marines in Lebanon was badly bungled. Casey worked closely with the Saudis to assassinate the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, exploding a massive car bomb outside his residence in 1985. Eighty people died and two hundred were wounded, but Fadlallah escaped unharmed.
While running roughshod over Central America and the Caribbean, Reagan also trampled the United States' working class and poor, who were sacrificed to the exigencies of a massive military buildup, which was cheered on by the more than fifty members of the Committee on the Present Danger who held official positions. Right after the 1980 election, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had warned that a "defense spending binge" would be "the worst thing that could happen" to the United States. Reagan ignored that advice, having campaigned on the fiction that the United States was militarily weak and vulnerable to a Soviet attack, saying, "we're in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor . Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country."
Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum praised Budget Director David Stockman's adroitness at cutting the budget, "but," he added, "I also think you've been cruel, inhumane and unfair." Four hundred eight thousand people lost their eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children [ AFDC] by 1983, and 299,000 saw their benefits cut. Reagan prodded Congress into cutting $2 billion out of the $12 billion food stamp budget and $1 billion from the $3.5 billion budget for school lunches. The budgets for Medicaid, child nutrition, housing, and energy assistance were also pared. Federal funds for cities were cut almost in half. While waging war on the poor, Reagan cut the highest income tax rate, which was 70 when he took office to 28 percent by the time he left.
New and upgraded weapons systems rolled off the assembly lines, including the long-delayed and very costly MX missile program, which moved missiles around loops that hid their precise location, making them largely invulnerable to a Soviet first first strike. Reagan knew that the Soviets, whose economy was stagnant, would be hard pressed to keep pace.
The nuclear arms budget also grew by leaps and bounds. In 1981, George Kennan, the architect of U.S. containment policy, decried the continuing senseless buildup of nuclear weapons : "We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the sea."
Reagan and Bush were anything but helpless in their arms buildup. They rejected the widely held view that nuclear war would lead to mutual destruction and began planning to win such a war --- an approach advocated by nuclear extremists like Colin Gray and Keith Payne, who declared in 1980, "The United States should plan to defeat the Soviet Union." They believed that the United States might lose 20 million citizens in the process. The key to surviving a nuclear attack, they posited, was an effective command-and-control structure to prevent chaos and keep lines of communication open. The military called this "C3" : command, control, and communications. Reagan invested heavily to ensure its invulnerability. Perversely, he projected such a war--winning strategy onto the Soviets. He pointed to a massive Soviet civil defense program as proof, even though no such program existed.
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