The Progressive Response
Volume 8, Number 19
July 28, 2004
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
| Foreign Policy In Focus | |
The Progressive Response (PR) is produced weekly by the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) as part of its Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. FPIF, a "Think Tank Without Walls," is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." FPIF is joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/, or email <feedback@fpif.org> to share your thoughts with us.
John Gershman, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) (online at www.irc-online.org) and co-director of FPIF. He can be contacted at john@irc-online.org.
Table of Contents
I. Updates and Out-Takes
THE HAND-OVER THAT WASN’T: HOW THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ CONTINUES
By Antonia JuhaszTHEY'RE BACK: NEOCONS REVIVE THE COMMITTEE ON THE PRESENT DANGER, THIS TIME AGAINST TERRORISM
By Jim LobeOLD SAILORS NEVER DIE: 9/11 COMMISSIONER JOHN LEHMAN ON THE WAR PATH
By Tom BarryFROM IRAQ TO ASIA—THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)THE DISAPPOINTING SELECTION OF JOHN EDWARDS, A FOREIGN POLICY HAWK
By Stephen ZunesTHE WORLD BANK'S GREAT GAMBLE IN CENTRAL AFRICA
By Leif BrottemWHAT IS BRAZIL DOING IN HAITI?
By Emir Sader
II. Letters and Comments
MALCONTENTS
and a RESPONSE FROM NORMAN BIRNBAUMNEED A MORE BALANCED VIEW OF REAGAN AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR
and a RESPONSE FROM STEPHEN ZUNES
I. Updates and Out-Takes
THE HAND-OVER THAT WASN’T: HOW THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ CONTINUES
By Antonia Juhasz
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new policy report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0407iraqtransf.html.)
The U.S. occupation of Iraq officially ended on June 28, 2004, in a secret ceremony in Baghdad. Officially, “full sovereignty” was handed from the Americans to the Iraqi Interim Government. But it was clear from the start that this was sovereignty in name, not in deed. First, there is the continued military occupation: 138,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines, plus 20,000 troops from other countries and an estimated 20,000 contractors, all fully under U.S. control and immune to Iraqi laws. Equally debilitating, however significantly less well reported upon, is the continued political and economic occupation by the Bush administration and its corporate allies.
The most important tools being used by the Bush administration to maintain varying degrees of economic and political control in Iraq are the 100 Orders enacted by L. Paul Bremer, III, head of the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) before his departure. It was thought that the “end” of the occupation would also mean the end of the Orders. Instead, in his final Order enacted on his last day in the country, Bremer simply transferred authority for the Orders over to the new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi. For his part, Allawi—a thirty-year exile of Iraq with close ties to both the CIA and British Intelligence Services—is considered America’s new man in charge of Iraq.
Bremer also ensured the implementation of the Orders by stacking every Ministry with U.S.-appointed authorities with five-year terms—well into the period of the new, elected government, which is to take office by the end of this year.
The Orders are exercised pursuant to the Iraqi interim constitution, the Transitional Administration Law (TAL). The Annex to the TAL states that the Orders can only be overturned with the approval of the president, the two vice presidents and a majority of the ministers. But the Annex also denies the interim government from taking “any actions affecting Iraq’s destiny” beyond the election of an Iraqi government. The identical sentence appears in UN Security Council Resolution 1546, which outlines Iraq’s transition to “sovereignty.” Thus, while Allawi may succeed in overturning a few less far-reaching Orders if for no other reason than to demonstrate his independence from the Americans, it is beyond his authority to change any fundamental laws.
And, as Bremer said about the Orders, “You set up these things and they begin to develop a certain life and momentum on their own—and it’s harder to reverse course.”
(Antonia Juhasz is a Project Director at the International Forum on Globalization, www.ifg.org, and a Foreign Policy In Focus, www.fpif.org, scholar. She is a Project Censored Award recipient and co-author of Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, 2nd Ed. Her articles have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, the Cambridge University Review of International Relations Journal, and the Johannesburg Star.)
THEY'RE BACK: NEOCONS REVIVE THE COMMITTEE ON THE PRESENT DANGER, THIS TIME AGAINST TERRORISM
By Jim Lobe
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0407cpd3.html.)
A bipartisan group of 41 mainly neoconservative foreign-policy hawks has launched the latest incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), whose previous two incarnations mobilized public support for rolling back Soviet-led communism but whose new enemy will be “global terrorism.”
The new group, whose formation was announced at a Capitol Hill press conference July 20, said its “single mission” will be to “advocate policies intended to win the war on global terrorism—terrorism carried out by radical Islamists opposed to freedom and democracy.”
“The Committee intends to remain active until the present danger is no longer a threat, however long that takes,” said CPD chairman R. James Woolsey, who served briefly as former President Bill Clinton’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director and has often referred to the battle against radical Islam as “World War IV.”
Woolsey appeared with Senators Joseph Lieberman, a neoconservative Democrat who was former Vice President Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona with strong connections to the Christian Right. In a joint column published July 20 in the Washington Post, the two senators argued, “Too many people are insufficiently aware of our enemy’s evil worldwide designs, which include waging jihad against all Americans and reestablishing a totalitarian religious empire in the Middle East.”
“The past struggle against communism was, in some ways, different from the current war against Islamist terrorism,” the two men wrote, evoking the two past CPDs. “But...the national and international solidarity needed to prevail over both enemies is...the same. In fact, the world war against Islamic terrorism is the test of our time.”
At the press conference later, Lieberman said the purpose of the new group was “to form a bipartisan citizens’ army, which is ready to fight a war of ideas against our Islamist terrorist enemies, and to send a clear signal that their strategy to deceive, demoralize and divide America will not succeed.”
The two senators also claimed that the new CPD consists of “citizens of diverse political persuasions,” although the vast majority of the 41 members are well-known neoconservatives who have strongly helped lead the drive to war in Iraq and have long supported broadening President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” to include Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, as well.
(Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, online at www.fpif.org. He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)
OLD SAILORS NEVER DIE: 9/11 COMMISSIONER JOHN LEHMAN ON THE WAR PATH
By Tom Barry
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new commentary from IRC’s Rightweb project available in full at http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0407warpath.php.)
Blame the CIA. That’s a political agenda that has found bipartisan support in Congress. Both the right and the left saw the departure of CIA chief George Tenet as a first step toward improving U.S. intelligence capabilities.
This month two bipartisan committees—the independent 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee—reviewing U.S. counterterrorism policy and the administration’s response to 9/11 have fingered the CIA as having led the U.S. government astray. This assessment conflicts with the popular assumption that right-wing politics and ideology have driven all decisions by the Bush administration, including the war on Iraq. But rather than blaming the politicization of intelligence, the congressional bodies have followed the traditional route of scapegoating the CIA.
One of the most vocal critics of the CIA’s performance has been John F. Lehman Jr., former Navy secretary under President Reagan and member of the independent 9/11 Commission, which will release its final report later this month. Lehman is also a leading candidate to replace Tenet as director of central intelligence.
Over the past four decades Lehman has been a consistent advocate of U.S. military supremacy and ever-increasing military budgets. During his tenure as Navy secretary, he oversaw the expansion of the U.S. naval fleet in opposition to many in the Navy who believed that the young hot-shot—who took over the job at the age of 38—vastly overestimated the Soviet threat. He pushed out highly regarded officers such as Adm. Hyman Rickover, while winning the admiration and friendship of the most ideologically driven members of the administrations, such as Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane.
Unlike many of the neocons and militarists who have shaped and supported the aggressive foreign policy of President George W. Bush, Lehman is no chicken hawk. As a Naval Reserve Officer, Lehman flew combat missions during the Vietnam War. But he has long traveled in the same ideological circles of the militarist right wing. He has been a longtime critic of the CIA, not because of its propensity for covert operations but because of its passivity and timid threat assessments. He blames for the CIA for misleading assessments of the tactics of the Vietnamese guerrilla armies and for downplaying Soviet military strength.
Lehman has long charged that the CIA has dismissed dissenting points of views. He has faulted the CIA for not giving adequate attention to theories that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 9/11 attacks, and even the anthrax attacks of the fall of 2001. And Lehman continues to parrot the arguments of the neoconservatives, regularly appearing in the Weekly Standard, that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were close collaborators.
That John Lehman has even been considered as capable of directing the overhaul of the badly flawed U.S. intelligence system underscores the degree to which right-wing ideologues and agendas continue to shape U.S. national security strategy. The main lesson for intelligence reform that should be drawn from recent U.S. foreign policy misadventures is that politicized intelligence is bad intelligence.
Certainly the CIA fell short in providing fact-based intelligence about the al Qaeda threat and the alleged Iraqi threat. But, as it has done in the past, notably under pressure from Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger in the late 1970s, the CIA reworked its own intelligence estimates to reflect the ideological convictions of the administration. But John Lehman—along with the neoconservatives, the trigger-happy militarists like Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the liberal hawks in the Democratic Party—also got it very wrong. Conveniently, they all join together again in blaming the CIA for its faulty fact-checking.
(Tom Barry is policy director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, www.irc-online.org, and author of numerous books on international relations. He can be contacted at tom@irc-online.org.)
FROM IRAQ TO ASIA—THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0407butterfly.html.)
Media attention in late June focused on the European Union summit in Ireland, the NATO summit in Turkey, and the surprise early transfer of “sovereignty” to the Iraqi interim government. As noteworthy as each of these might have been, equally significant events were occurring or being planned in East Asia, ones that, in an interdependent world, affect and were affected by what transpired elsewhere.
Perhaps the most important event was the June 23-26 Six-Party Talks in Beijing. At the end of the working group and senior delegate meetings, all participants—North and South Korea, Russia, Japan, China, and the U.S.—agreed that “progress” had been made. If nothing else, the six countries agreed to meet in September.
Non-nuclear considerations complicate the U.S. position in the six-party talks. Within South Korea itself, anti-U.S. feeling appears to be growing. The reassignment of 3,600 U.S. soldiers to Iraq duty, the possibility that additional troops will be withdrawn by next year as part of a global U.S. realignment of forces, as well as the re-positioning away from the DMZ of the U.S. forces that remain in South Korea, are raising questions about the continuing commitment of the U.S. forward presence in Northeast Asia.
And given the high probability that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan will stabilize quickly, it now seems likely that the U.S. personnel footprint will be reduced permanently in the Western Pacific. The two battalions of Marines sent from Okinawa to Iraq, and possibly more, may be re-positioned in the U.S. when they rotate from Iraq back. The Navy is already in the process of building forces that will be based at Guam—submarines and an aircraft carrier battle group—complementing Air Force assets already there.
As the U.S. works with China and Japan to diffuse the standoff with North Korea, further south a sequence of planned military exercises involving Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. on one side and China on the other serve notice that volatile and conflicting national interests remain unresolved. As July began, seven countries—Australia, Canada, Chile, Great Britain, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. —launched the bi-annual RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) exercise which this year is much larger than in 2002 as fewer U.S. ships are in the Persian Gulf. Then, in mid-July, Operation Summer Pulse 04 will test the U.S. Navy’s innovative “Fleet Response Plan.” This envisions “surging” as many as six to nine carrier battle groups within 30 days and two more in 90 days in response to crises rather than maintaining two or three battle groups deployed forward around the clock. Some observers see the exercise, which some reports suggest will include representatives from Taiwan’s military, as a reminder to China that the U.S. fully intends to help Taiwan should Beijing use force against the island. Strangely, what wasn’t mentioned in the media accounts is the fact that the Navy exercise also holds implications for any attack contemplated by North Korea on the South.
As recent disclosures have made clear, since September 11, 2001, everything the U.S. does, wherever it acts, whatever it says, Iraq—and by extension the administration’s “war on terror”—has operated as its defining paradigm in international relations. This in turn has acted as a set of blinders that narrowed the field of vision of Washington policymakers. The result, predictably, is that officials, locked into the recurring rut of military “solutions,” cannot perceive the non-military, socio-economic, and nationalistic pressures and aspirations that influence the perceptions of allies, friends, and even adversaries. Only in extremis does Washington acknowledge and seriously consider that the national interests of others do matter and do affect the achievement of U.S. goals.
For the administration, the real challenge at this juncture may be deciding whether it can add one more ball to its juggling act. From the perspective of the White House, with Iraq “liberated,” Iran reluctantly opening its nuclear facilities to international monitors, and North Korea still engaged in the six-party talks, the “Axis of Evil” has been blunted even though bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda-like organizations still pose a threat to U.S interests. But this threat is not to long-term U.S. dominance; that, in pre-September 11 administration rhetoric, comes from only one quarter: China.
And the butterfly?
On June 28, when he was handed the paper transferring sovereignty from the occupation authorities back to Iraqis, Ghazi al-Yawer, president of the new Iraqi interim government, told reporters: “I felt a butterfly inside my heart.” It is a metaphor Washington would do well to remember, for the flutter of that butterfly’s wings in Iraq at the end of June may someday cause a typhoon in the Pacific.
(Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, online at www.fpif.org, a retired U.S. army colonel and a senior fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.)
THE DISAPPOINTING SELECTION OF JOHN EDWARDS, A FOREIGN POLICY HAWK
By Stephen Zunes
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0407edwards.html.)
John Kerry’s decision to select a vice presidential running mate who shares his militaristic foreign policy agenda has once again demonstrated the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s willingness to take the party’s activist core, which overwhelmingly supports human rights and international law, for granted.
While bringing Senator John Edwards—a bright and charismatic Southern populist—onto the Democratic ticket might attract some voters, it will likely serve to further alienate the majority of Democrats already disappointed in Kerry’s strident support for President George W. Bush’s illegal and disastrous decision to invade Iraq as well as a number of other questionable foreign and military policies of the current administration.
In September of 2002, in the face of growing public skepticism of the Bush administration’s calls for an invasion of Iraq, Senator Edwards rushed to their defense in an op-ed article published in the Washington Post. In his commentary, Edwards claimed that Iraq, which had been successfully disarmed several years earlier, was actually “a grave and growing threat” and Congress should therefore “endorse the use of all necessary means to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” Claiming “our national security requires” that Congress grant President Bush unprecedented war powers, he further insisted, “we must not tie our own hands by requiring Security Council action...”
The Bush administration was so impressed with Edwards’ arguments that they posted the article on the State Department website.
Two weeks later, Edwards joined Kerry in authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq whenever and under whatever circumstances he chose. When the invasion went forward—despite Iraq’s belated cooperation with UN inspectors and the absence of any signs of recent WMD activity—Edwards joined Kerry in supporting a Republican-sponsored resolution which “commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President… in the conflict against Iraq.” In the same resolution—despite the consensus of the international legal community that such an offensive war is illegal—Edwards joined Kerry in insisting that the war was “lawful.” Subsequently, despite growing public disenchantment with the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, Edwards has also joined Kerry in supporting the ongoing U.S. occupation.
Given the nature of the presidential election process and the Democrats’ superior record to that of the Republicans on the environment, civil liberties, and a number of other issues, most supporters of peace and international law will probably vote for the Kerry/Edwards ticket anyway. It would be naïve, however, to take such voters for granted.
It did not have to be this way. There are quite a few Democratic leaders who, unlike Kerry, do support more ethical and rational foreign policies. If the Democrats were smart, they would have tried to balance the ticket by bringing in someone who identifies with the party’s liberal majority instead of yet another Senate hawk trying to be some kind of a “Bush Lite.”
If the Democrats want our vote in November, they need to convince us that, in this time of unprecedented international threats and pressing domestic needs, they will pursue a more responsible foreign and military policy than that of the Republican incumbents. Choosing John Edwards as the party’s vice presidential nominee has only made that job more difficult.
(Stephen Zunes, formerly a Democratic Party activist in his native North Carolina, is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus, online at www.fpif.org.)
THE WORLD BANK'S GREAT GAMBLE IN CENTRAL AFRICA
By Leif Brottem
(Editor’s Note: Excperted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0407gamble.html.)
The first tanker loaded with Chadian crude oil embarked from the Cameroonian port of Kribi on October 5th, 2003. The landlocked Central African nation of Chad will receive around $2 billion over the lifetime of the oil fields developed by a consortium led by energy giant Exxon-Mobil.
Through its financial backing of the project, the World Bank is putting to the test a new approach to an old African problem: the marriage of oil, embezzlement, and political corruption. Through a carefully orchestrated plan to impose transparency and good governance on the elected Chadian officials, the bank aims to ensure that the money is used to benefit the nation’s people, who are among the poorest in the world.
To those eager to use the project as a beachhead into the region’s oil fields, the World Bank seems to have created the perfect mechanism to deal with Africa’s undemocratic governments. Yet those members of the international community that expect a willful transformation in Chad seem to ignore one potent variable: the nation’s political situation. On October 10th, Chadian President Idriss Deby celebrated the oil project’s inauguration, and human rights organizations observed a nationwide day of mourning. As the oil starts flowing, optimists have their fingers crossed and see it as a chance for Chad. The Chadians themselves just want to avoid the worst and, for once, live in peace and security.
Arrival in the capital of N’Djamena does not belie that Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world. The airport is a dark, low-slung building with few functioning elements. Paved roads are rare; the norm is sandy, potholed avenues flanked by open sewers. Neighborhoods of mud brick homes give the air of a vast village, not the nation’s largest and ostensibly wealthiest urban center. In rural areas, infrastructure of any kind is virtually nonexistent. Village schools, where they exist, consist of branches and palm fronds. In N’Djamena, buildings pockmarked with bullet holes remind one of the not-too-distant civil war. Omnipresent armed men suggest that the fighting may never have ended.
(FPIF Policy Analyst Leif Brottem is a researcher, based in Chad.)
WHAT IS BRAZIL DOING IN HAITI?
By Emir Sader
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new commentary from the IRC’s Americas Program available in full at http://www.americaspolicy.org/commentary/2004/0406brazil.html.)
Sending Brazilian troops to Haiti initiates a risky phase of Brazil’s new foreign policy and reflects heavy pressures from abroad.
For some time now, Brazil has been demanding a permanent spot on the U.N. Security Council. A more aggressive foreign policy and the international prestige of Lula have intensified this campaign, which received significant endorsements from France and China among others. Since the minute Brazil assumed a post as a rotating member of the Security Council earlier this year, its actions have been a test of how it would behave if it were made a permanent member. This decision represents a dangerous attitude and has serious implications.
First of all, Brazil is sanctioning the controversial foreign intervention in which former Haitian President Jean-Bernard Aristide was removed from power. This sets a delicate precedent for the region, since many neighboring countries could potentially be considered candidates for intervention, due to serious institutional crises. Venezuela and Bolivia are just two examples.
Secondly, the domestic situation in Haiti is such that Brazilian military intervention could likely become long-term. Since the beginning, foreign troops have had to contend with armed groups of the political resistance and others. This spells a risk of a confrontation that could have tragic consequences. The possibility of Haitians killed by Latin American troops—Brazilian, Argentine, or Chilean—would be tragic. The United States would then be able to put into practice a plan developed long ago—and largely rejected in Colombia—for regional troops to shoulder the burden of political and military stabilization.
The stated objective is to support Haitian reconstruction, which does not explain why paratroopers, marines and infantrymen should be sent instead of teachers, doctors or sanitary engineers. Clearly, the establishment of basic stability is a necessary requirement in the search for a solution to the humanitarian crisis. But without a time frame to assure stability for the country, foreign troops could impede rather than facilitate cooperation toward that end.
Brazil’s fundamental challenge is to discover alternatives to its risky policy regarding Haiti.
First, regardless of one’s opinion of the Aristide government, any stance that legitimizes its overthrow by foreign military intervention is dangerous. Second, if foreign involvement is absolutely necessary to solve a crisis that should be the in the hands of the Haitian people, then support should be sought from the Caribbean Community (Caricom), the organization that coordinates Caribbean countries.
The operation to replace North American troops with South American ones is now under way. We should demand that the occupation last as little as possible, to make way for a legitimate internal solution. This solution should be based on the grassroots organization of the Haitian people, who today are the victims of yet another foreign intervention in the long history that began when they became the first nation to defeat colonialism in Latin America.
(Emir Sader is Brazilian, coordinator of the Laboratory of Public Policies of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and a contributor to the IRC Americas Program. He is the author, among other books, of La Venganza de la História, Ed. Clacso.)
II. Letters and Comments
Re: All Unquiet on the Western Front: Unifying Europe Not Lining Up Behind the U.S. (http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/0406western.html)
Mr. Birnbaum missed a major point. Given a choice, most Americans would never seriously consider living as Euros, or as Euro-ites, if they could but sample that lifestyle. Rather Europeans, and others, as well as Mr. Birnbaum have an elite view of their importance, (or lack thereof), in the world and their inability to dictate socialism worldwide. The point missed is this: most Americans have ancestors that left Europe for very good reasons. It’s only the malcontent that looks wistfully in that direction for future guidance.
--Rick Heaton, rheaton@kvnet.org
I am grateful to Mr. Heaton for his interest in my article. Since the argument in one or another form has been going on for a while, I content myself with two remarks. (1) Many immigrants to this country from what was then Old Europe left to live in a freer atmosphere than that provided by an exploitative class society, changed in that respect for the better over the past century by the conjoint efforts of social democrats and social Christians. (2) Paradoxically, the dismantlement of the American welfare state and more recent developments brings the US closer to what that Old Europe was like in terms of inflicting economic uncertainty and status anxiety upon considerable parts of the nation. With private welfare states in the managerial echelons, in the universities, in government jobs and in the professions, of course, the top twenty percent of Americans have good market positions with respect to health care, education, life expectancy, vacation—it is just the others who cannot live like Europeans. Finally, as to choice: it would be splendid if choice of society could be debated in our elections, but that has not been the case since c 1948.
NEED A MORE BALANCED VIEW OF REAGAN AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR
Re: Don't Credit Reagan for Ending the Cold War (http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406reagan.html)
I was a visiting scholar in the Soviet Union several times in the late 1980's, including a semester as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in 1989, and want to comment based on my extensive conversations with many Soviet citizens.
Mr. Zunes is right that the ending of the cold war was largely an internal affair produced by the people themselves. Reagan's military buildup in the early 80s actually slowed the process by giving power to Soviet military generals who wanted to build up their own military in response, as both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze have said. The fall of the Soviet Union was well underway before Reagan and was still in tact when Reagan left office. It died slowly from its oppression and inability to produce well-being for its citizens.
However, you overlook the power of important external events on empowering Soviet-bloc citizens. In particular, the Helsinki Accords of 1975 created a standard of human rights for Europe, including the USSR, which inspired, empowered, and enlarged the voice of the emerging dissidents in the Soviet bloc.
And Reagan made three very important contributions, all of them verbal, which accelerated the process. By labeling the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" he gave voice to a truth that all throughout the Soviet Union recognized as such. Those words resonated there and were very influential. Second, by saying "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," Reagan absolutely sped its fall. Finally, his speech at Moscow State University, telecast live across the Soviet Union, spoke simply of human freedom (the right to travel, live freely, etc.), and countless Soviet citizens found inspiration in that speech. They told me so.
It is important to combat the right-wing myth that Reagan single-handedly ended the cold war and that he did so mainly by military confrontation. However, a balanced view should appropriately see that Reagan's forthright labeling of the Soviet Union for what it was and calling for freedom inspired many throughout the Soviet Union and speeded its demise.
--Sam McFarland, sam.mcfarland@wku.edu
Outside influence was indeed important, particularly the international human rights campaigns that were able to rally around the Helsinki Accord. This made possible important linkages between pro-democracy activists on the ground and outside NGOs.
Reagan's eloquent words in support of freedom—as opposed to his actual policies—may have also helped, though I don't see how his words were any more inspirational than Jimmy Carter's. Perhaps the combination of glasnost and improved communications technologies made it possible for more people in the eastern bloc to hear them.
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