Or, maybe, do as I did, not as I say. Or even, do as I say, not as Reagan did. You may have heard that our former veep, Ragin’ Dick Cheney, ripped our current veep, Mild Mike Pence, a new one over the Trump Administration’s less than rumbustious foreign policy. Money quote (or money shot) from Big Dick: “I worry that the bottom line of that kind of an approach is we have an administration that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.”
Well, Dick, let’s look at the record. Under ballsy Ronald Reagan, there were about 350 combat deaths, with perhaps twice that number of total casualties (which include deaths). Figures for President Obama’s two terms are harder to parse, since he inherited two wars, but the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count gives more than 2,000 dead in Afghanistan and Iraq (both combat and non-combat) and perhaps 24,000 total casualties, the great majority coming in Afghanistan. For the Bush/Cheney administration, over 4,000 combat deaths and over 40,000 casualties.
The disparity between deaths and casualties is so great when comparing the Bush and Obama administrations to Reagan’s because Reagan never attempted to fight a war, and the great bulk of the deaths came from a single suicide bombing in Beirut in 1982, when Reagan stupidly and aimlessly sent American troops into the middle of a civil war,1 though sensibly taking them out again when he realized how stupid it was.2 A president who corrects his own mistakes! How rare is that?
If Reagan hadn’t sent troops to Lebanon, and hadn’t authorized military action against the Muslim “rebels”, his death count would have been scarcely more than 100. Go back to the days of Ronnie, Dickie Boy? If only one could!
Afterwords
“Like Obama before him, Trump likely realizes he will be blamed for any bad thing that happens that is perceived to be the result of inaction, while the political consequences of ill-advised intervention will either be nonexistent or spread around the Beltway establishment,” wrote the elegantly appellated W. James Antle III, editor of the American Conservative in a nice commentary on Cheney does Pence. Obama’s positioning of himself as the “peace” president was destroyed by the rise of ISIS back in 2014, which he (of course) should have and could have prevented, as the many, many voices of the hydra-headed Military Intellectual Complex immediately and endlessly “explained” to the public, including both his less than loyal lieutenants Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, former secretaries of state and defense. Every president is “safer” if he is seen as “doing everything he can.” After the beheading of two Americans in the Middle East, it became impossible for Obama to end our fruitless (fruitless in all but blood) war in Afghanistan, though the two were entirely unrelated. And Trump, of course, is still there. As in virtually every field of endeavor, it is acceptable to fail while following the conventional wisdom, but disastrous to do so when departing from it.
1. Right-wingers invariably portray the Beirut bombing as a terrorist attack, but it was simply a retaliatory response to the decision of the U.S. to take sides in the war. Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the Marine commander, said “It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support—which I strongly opposed—for a week to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on September 19 and that the French conducted an air strike on September 23 in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.”
2. Of course, when House Speaker Tip O'Neill advocated withdrawal immediately after the deaths, he was denounced by the White House as a coward. After an appropriate delay, it was announced that the troops had been "redeployed".
