Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Remember the brouhaha occasioned by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s invocation of Ayatollah Khomeini’s statement that ‘the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time’? Last night I was reading America Alone, Stephen Halper and Jonathan Clarke’s book on the disastrous legacy of the neoconservatives (the authors are respectively a British and an American conservative) and on page 234 I found a very interesting quote, almost identical to the late Ayatollah’s statement. Commenting on ‘limited nuclear war’, we there have ‘the great communicator’, Ronald Reagan, and he is proposing nothing less than ‘wiping the Soviet Union out of the book of history as the incarnation of evil’.

What is also of interest is the long, sometimes comical, struggle between the neocons and the paleocons over Reagan’s legacy, where the former went so far as to label their call to arms, ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy‘. In order to do so, however, the neocons have to sweep under the rug nearly half a decade of writing denouncing Reagan. While Reagan began very much as a neocon candidate, bringing on board a whole stable of Committee on Present Danger veterans to his administration, relations soon turned sour, first over the AWACs sale to Saudi Arabia, and later over the withdrawal of US marines from Lebanon. Neocon rottweiller Norman Podhoretz began his denunciations of Reagan as early as 1983, but by the end of Reagan’s second term, especially in the light of the warming relations with Gorbachev, the tone had grown almost vituperative.