Historically, I have often faulted Reagan's actions in regards to the rising threat of Islamist terror. In fact, I have said that Bush is having to deal with the mistakes of his four immediate predecessors, as each had opportunities to confront and deal with Islamic terrorism, and in each case chose the easier, simpler, softer approach -- decisions that led to the current state of affairs.
President Jimmy Carter was confronted with the challenge of Iran seizing our embassy in Teheran, taking our citizens hostage. By any definition, this was an open act of war and a full military reprisal would have been fully justified. Instead, Carter dithered and dawdled and fretted, reinforcing the perception of the United States as a toothless tiger.
The first President Bush did a superb job in uniting much of the Muslim world to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and in my opinion made the only choice he could when he refrained from going further and removing Saddam from power. I fault him not for that decision, but for not laying the groundwork in advance with our nominal allies in the Muslim world to commit to deposing Saddam before the fighting began.
President Clinton was not elected as a foreign policy president, and it showed. He allowed our peacekeepers in Somalia to change into a peace-making force, then denied them the weapons and equipment to succeed. The following slaughter of United States Rangers and ignominious retreat reinforced the image President Carter had fostered with his weak response to Iran's taking of our embassy.
Clinton was also either incapable or unwilling to see the rise of Islamist terrorism as a palpable threat. He treated each attack as an isolated incident, one more of a crime than an act of war. The first World Trade Center bombing, the African embassy bombings, the Khobar Towers bombing, the near-sinking of the USS Cole -- each was given to law-enforcement officials for resolution, not the intelligence or military communities.
But Reagan did far more -- both by commission and omission -- to foster the current crisis with Islamist terrorism than any other president. His arms-for-hostages deal with Iran (and its proxies, Hezbollah) established the currency for the lives of the innocent, and prolonged the Iran-Iraq war. His support for the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan gave militant Islam its first real victory against a Western power, planting the seeds for the rise of the Taliban and the genesis of Al Qaeda. (Osama Bin Laden got his first taste of violence in that war.) His sending US troops into Lebanon under absurd rules of engagement as "peacekeepers" placed far too many Americans in harm's way with no reasonable way to protect themselves, and the sudden retreat when the inevitable Hezbollah attack occurred sent the unmistakable message: if you kill enough Americans, we will retreat.
Read the whole thing.
Mr. Tea does provide Reagan with some cover later in the column by pointing out that a war against Islamic terror and fundamentalism wasn't on Ronnie's radar. A bigger blip, a red blip labled the USSR, occupied America's attention during Reagan's administration, so one can hardly fault him for noticing the potential threat to the free world from Islamic extremists in the middle east.
But that doesn't mean we can't learn from the mistakes made by President Reagan, as well as other past Presidents, and that's the larger point, I think, of Jay's piece.
The lessons we learn from those past Presidents should be these: Treating jihadists with kid gloves is foolish. Diplomacy with the jihadists and/or their sponsor states is equally foolish. If we commit to fighting the jihadists on the ground then we must a) display a willingness to completely obliterate our enemies and b) must not pull out until victory is achieved.