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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (37533)	3/10/1999 6:40:00 PM
From: nuke44	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

It's hard for people who weren't actually there to comprehend the difference in the morale of the U.S. military and in the U.S. State Department after only six months of Reagan's first term in office. We had gone through the fiasco of the Viet Nam years to the zoo of the Watergate era, to the good intentioned, but incompetent and star-crossed Carter Presidency. We had gone from returning home to an openly hostile public following the politically orchestrated debacle in Southeast Asia, to the brinkmanship of a pissed-off Nixon, to the unchecked spread of AK-47 diplomacy to every corner of the globe. Even before the increase in the defense budget under Reagan, it was an entire new world for those of us who had made a career representing U.S. interests abroad. We had a clearly defined mission(s) for the first time in more than a decade and we were given 100% support from Washington by an administration staffed by Reagan with knowledgeable professionals instead of the traditional gaggle of power brokers and political dilletantes. For me, Reagan's eight years in office were the busiest of an Air Force career that spanned 28 years and included Viet Nam and Desert Storm. I set foot in the U.S. only three times for a total of five months during that period because the pace and the criticality of the work being performed. The modernization and implementation of cutting edge weapons systems was nonstop and in most cases accomplished ahead of schedule. The most notable of these systems were the Army's Pershing II and the Air Force's Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) at sites throughout NATO, the construction of one wing of Peacekeeper (MX) missiles at the SAC base in Cheyenne Wyoming, and the modernization of both the surface and subsurface Navy at a rate never before seen in peacetime. The sheer logistics of the implementation of these various system is a triumph of engineering and personal dedication on a scale that is hard to imagine. We did the grunt work and Reagan accomplished the near impossible feat of insuring that we had the backing of our allies and the support of our own government. On the whole, most of these feats went unnoticed except in the place where where they meant to be noticed, The Kremlin. I was involved in the installation of the GLCM system at Comiso, Sicily and Greenham Common, UK. Another half dozen GLCM installations were scheduled to come on line, but they were unnecessary as the Soviet Union capitulated to strategic arms limitations after realizing that they were in a contest that they had no chance of winning. Two years after that there was no Soviet Union and no Warsaw Pact. The Reagan years were a heady time to be an American abroad in the service of this country. The Clinton years have only dramatized how quickly a position of power and credibility can be reduced to the level of a tabloid side-show.