Gorbachev and Lech Walesa risked their lives to end communism. Long before Reagan many eros helped bring down that empire piece by piece, including religious leaders, European leaders, West Germany's offer to pay for East Germany, the No-Nukes peace movement, rock n' roll and The Beatles "Living in the USSR", hippies, mujeheddin and of course Carter who bravely engaged the Soviets with SALT II and melted a lot of ice.
What Reagan did was come into a situation where communism was already melting down, and where Gorbachev had brought Grasnost to the Soviet government, and Reagan went along with it. Reagan deseves some credit, but not the most, and not nearly as much as Sean Hannity type liars try to give him. In fact, If Reagan hadn't been elected and Carter had stayed in, the Soviet Union probably would have ended just as quickly. Plus Reagan's Berlin Wall speech was after the SU had already fallen. That wall was coming down anyway.
Hannity's logic is the same BS used by mega-hawks who say Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war with Japan. In fact the war was already over, it was just a question of putting a big exclamation point on it. Also, the MX missile in particular was a very bad, dangerous and super-wasteful idea. Tens of billions were thrown away on that boondoggle, and SDI was almost as bad. Just the idea of the MX was nuclear madness. |
