QandO

June 07, 2004

They Just Can't Help Themselves
Posted by Dale Franks

So, when the President who is generally credited with winning the Cold War dies, who does the New York Times get to eulogize him?

Why, Mikhail Gorbachev, of course!

At our first meeting in Geneva in 1985 I represented a new, changing Soviet Union. Of course, the new Soviet leadership could have continued in the old ways. But we chose a different path, because we saw the critical problems of our country and the urgent need to step back from the edge of the abyss to which the nuclear arms race was pushing mankind.

The dialogue that President Reagan and I started was difficult. To reach agreement, particularly on arms control and security, we had to overcome mistrust and the barriers of numerous problems and prejudices.

I don't know whether we would have been able to agree and to insist on the implementation of our agreements with a different person at the helm of American government. True, Reagan was a man of the right. But, while adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiations and cooperation. And this was the most important thing to me: he had the trust of the American people.

In the final outcome, our insistence on dialogue proved fully justified. At a White House ceremony in 1987, we signed the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, which launched the process of real arms reduction. And, even though we saw the road to a world free of nuclear weapons differently, the very fact of setting this goal in 1986 in Reykjavik helped to break the momentum of the arms race.

After all, who better to comment on Reagan's legacy than the former Soviet leader whose chief historical effort in the intervening years has been to try and claim the credit for ending the Cold War?

To hear Gorby tell it, Reagan was slack-jawed with stupefaction at the USSR's far-reaching proposals to end the Cold War and disband the USSR. Fortunately, Reagan was a president "who listened", and thus simply got out of the way so that Gorby could do what needed to be done. Gorby writes that, once he laid down his wise proposals at Reykjavik in 1985, the US was inevitably drawn towards the wisdom of the Soviet proposals.

My friends, that's simply a steaming pile of horse droppings.

The truth is that Gorby and his fellow commies were scared spitless by Star Wars, and were desperately willing to offer something--anything--to prevent its deployment. It wasn't the deep problems of the USSR that prompted Gorby to make his offer at Reykjavik, it was desperation at the thought of a ballistic missile defense that would render the US and Europe immune to Soviet nuclear brinkmanship, along with the bracing realization that the USSR would never, ever be able to deploy a similar system.

We can, frankly, judge how concerned Gorby was over the state of the USSR's problems by the method he ultimately chose to solve them, which was to dissolve the USSR, and put himself, rather bitterly, it seems, out of a job.

And how much did the Sovs fear Star Wars? Well, after Reykjavik, Secretary of State George Schulz offered the Sovs a promise that we wouldn't deploy Star Wars for 7 years, and the Commies pathetically jumped at it like a starving man pouncing on a Milky Way. It is now 2004, and we still haven't deployed Star Wars. As Schulz said at the time, "Mr. President, we're offering them the sleeves to our vest. We don't have anything to deploy."

Gorbachev has been living in this fantasy world for the last decade. How very like the New York Times to indulge him in a parting shot on the man who beat him and consigned his country to "the ash-heap of history".

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