Democrats need to spread the recent historical information of what happens when the Republican Party obtains power. Michael Kinsey has “A Wonderful Piece” on the talk of bombing Iran but this section is one I wanted to highlight because it talks of what went down in the Middle East under Reagan. Here’s a slice:
Meanwhile, next door in Iraq, an ambitious young dictator, new to the job, named Saddam Hussein sensed both danger and opportunity in Iran’s chaos. So he decided to invade. Thus began the Iran-Iraq war, lasting eight years. It turned hundreds of thousands of people into corpses and millions into refugees. When it was over, nothing had changed. But it wasn’t a complete waste. It provided another opportunity for the United States to promote its interests and values.
On the “enemy of my enemy” principle, the United States all but officially backed Iraq. We overlooked Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers (many of them children), and against his own people. Many of the human rights abuses President Bush and others have invoked two decades later to justify the decision to topple and try Saddam were well publicized in the ’80s. But in the ’80s, we didn’t care. President Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld, then a drug-company executive, as his “special envoy” to tell Saddam that we didn’t care.
Meanwhile, of course, Reagan was also secretly selling weapons to Iran.
Everything we are seeing under Bush has its roots in the horrible Reagan Administrration of the 80’s. In fact many of the same players were operating then and they are back to give us more of their slime. These people need to be shut out of politics this November once and for all. If we can take the House back we can start the investigations that will help us shut down this Administration from doing any more damage in their last 3 years. Only through educating people to their repeated misuse of power can we hope to eject these clowns and stop the next group of young scary Republicans from ever gaining a foothold.
