Nitpick: his name is Antonin Scalia.
I’m a moderate who usually veers left at the last minute, but I think only partisanship would characterize Scalia’s presence on the Court as a ‘bad’ thing. No matter what his politics may be, he’s an articulate and intelligent jurist who belongs there on his merits. That’s my opinion of him, anyway.
Yes, let’s not forget Reagan’s support for the Mujahideen…who turned Afghanistan into a totaltarian theocracy and launched a jihaad against the United States and its allies. Brilliant work, that.
And for the record, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, under the Carter Administration, who bears initial credit/culpability for financing and training the Afghan resistance. So whatever acclaim/blame that is to be accredited for that action has to be shared by both presidents.
A critical strategic asset, the Falklands…almost as much so as Grenada. :rolleyes:
There is one particular item which can, possibly, be credited as being a significant factor in fiscally evicerating the Soviet Union and that Reagan strongly supported–that being the Shuttle program and the Soviet’s competing Buran system and Energya booster and all support equipment and facilities. At 20 billion rubles (est.) on the primary system alone is was the largest single line item in Soviet military spending from the early Seventies onward, and is widely thought to have contributed to domestic supply problems.
Reagan, of course, didn’t initiate the Shuttle program, and the first one launched barely three months into his presidency, but he did wax enthusiastically about it and his Administration supported it, albeit at the expense of other worthwhile programs.
But the Falklands Conflict…that’s a reach that threatens to dislocate the shoulder.
Stranger
It was one of the factions. And not only is it the case that what happenned later could not have been forseen, but it’s also irrelevant - they were a tool at the time. I mean, we helped Stalin fight Hitler, and look what happenned there.
The Falklands were not important for their strategic importance but for the effect on Western psychology that retaking them had. There was a new sense of optimism in the air - we weren’t still sliding down the plug-hole.
Not if you look at it with British eyes.
I don’t think Britain liberated the Falklands because it was a strategic asset. It did so because the Falklands had always belonged to Britain, the citizens were British, and they wanted to remain part of that nation. When a military dicatorship seized it, and then Thatcher kicked their ass, it showed the West wasn’t going to be pushed around by third-world thugs. It’s a lesson the world needed after Carter’s disgraceful handling of the Iran hostage crisis.
That’s not really true. The Mujahideen that first Carter, and then Reagan supported, evolved into what became the “Northern Alliance”, and are now in control of Afghanistan. While they have some unsavory characters, they didn’t do what you accused. The group that turned Afghanistan into a totalitarian theocracy was the Taliban, which was sponsored largely by the Pakistanis.
I seem to recall news reports at the time that the real reason Argentina wanted the Falklands was because there might be offshore oil there.
Turns out there is, but it is not recoverable in commercially viable amounts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Falkland_Islands#Petroleum_on_the_Falkland_Islands
I know this tread is about Reagan’s merits, but it has been veering in and out of a debate about the support for the space program.
Kennedy of course was the face of the space program to most of the American people, but Senator (and later Vice President) Johnson was the driving force in the senate. He was the one who pushed funding through committees. His motives might be debatable (Mission Control was in his home state, championing space was a good bargaining chip, he really did want us as a people to be great), but without Lyndon Johnson, it would have never gotten off the ground. Johnson managed to balance a large space budget, his Great Society and War on Poverty, and the growing Vietnam War. Say what you will about him, he was an ambitious man.
The main change that came under the Reagan administration was to give the Mujahadeen access to Stinger missiles. This allowed them to counter the very effective Soviet helicopter offensives, and probably turned the war. The failure of the war in Afghanistan helped to break the Soviet Union. It may have been the turning point of the cold war. So what Reagan did was absolutely the correct strategic move at the time. The Soviet Union was brutal to the people of Afghanistan. They created the largest refugee population in the world as millions of Afghanis fled the country. It was a just war, and the U.S. helped win it.
And of course the Pakistanis did this ALL on their own?
Nope. The Northern Alliance was a later coalition that ended up being supported by the Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union. The United States most certainly did provide weapons and training to the Pashtun tribes of the North West Frontier Provence (which is technically within the borders of Pakistan, but the people are ethnically and historically a part of Afghanistan.) Pakistan, at the time, was a fairly well regarded ally and was strongly supported by the Reagan and Bush I administrations (less so by Clinton, more out of an apparent apathy toward a coherent foreign policy than over moral issues), so any force aligned with Pakistan was also likely to be supported by the US.
I’ll conceed, as Sam Stone argues, that the supply of Stinger missiles was a decisive factor in the Afghan resistance, allowing them to down transport aircraft and the feared Hind Mi-24 gunships; and I daresay that nobody can argue that their cause, in repelling the unmitigated aggression of Soviet troops, was unjust. Certainly, the failures in Afghanistan contributed significantly to a loss of both public acclaim and esprit de corps of the Soviet Red Army. But given that these forces have turned from internal insurgency to international terrorism, I think it more than a bit presumptious to claim this as an unqualified victory for the Reagan Administration. Sometimes your choice of allies is limited to Bad and Worse, but the responsibility for subsequent developments still needs to be assigned.
As for the Falklands, whatever else might be said of it, it was not an item on Reagan’s plate, and indeed the sum resultant of the Administration was one of equivocation, with Reagan commenting that he couldn’t see why they were fighting over “that little bunch of icy land down there.” Aside from tacit moral support, the US did not provide military or logistical support for that effort. (If we had, things might have gone much easier for the British, who were limited in air support to launching Harriers from thru-deck cruisers with limited range and payload.) The British victory in the Falklands War might have been a boost for the foundering British Empire, and certainly it looked good that a NATO ally was able to handle a conflict (if even a small one) on their own, giving at least a patina of respectability to NATO as not being just a front for exlusively American interests, but the net contribution to the downfall of the Soviet Union is a gnat to a elephant. The Soviets were well on their way to the bottom long before the Argentines decided to get uppity about a disputed territory in the South Atlantic.
Again, I’m not arguing that Reagan was the demon-spawn, or “The Worst President In History” or any such nonsense. He was a very popular sitting President, in no small part because of his presence and sense of statesmanship; he was, in fact, the first President in a long while–since Kennedy, really–that seemed comfortable in the role. But as an executive and administrator his legacy left something to be desired. His part in ending the Cold War tends to be exaggerated, methinks, by Americans who saw him as the archtypical Cold Warrior, owing to his firm manner and strong (and sometimes overly bold) statements. But the reality is that there are a dozen world figures one can name offhand who contributed far more in actions and direct effects than Reagan can lay claim to. One might as well suggest that Nixon, in going to China, was the key figure in ending the Cultural Revolution and the end of the reign of the Gang of Four.
Stranger
President Reagan had a pretty bad reputation with environmentalists. Under his administration millions of acres of national lands were leased to gas, coal and oil companies for development. According to the Wilderness Society, he was responsible for more of that than any other administration in history – and that includes the current one.
One of the things that stands out most in my memory – and this surely isn’t his fault – is how bumbling he became in the last years of his presidency. It’s hard to put a date on it. Maybe it was mostly the last couple of years. There were times when Nancy had to prompt him to finish his sentences. I have wondered how far his illness had progressed.
It would have been interesting to see what Reagan could have done when he was in his early fifties – maybe even when he was still a Democrat. 
America provided significant Intelligence support.
The main result of the Falklands War was not territorial but psychological.
Reagan reproduced before he died.
He’s a success in the only way that really matters: Genetically.