Richard Perle: Against Evil
[Richard Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as assistant secretary of defense for international security from 1981-1987.]
One could assume that the dubious straw men invented by Peter Beinart ("Think Again: Ronald Reagan" July/August 2010) are the result of innocent misconstruction. After all, Beinart was only 10 years old when Ronald Reagan became president and began the daunting task of re-establishing American pride, confidence and global leadership after Jimmy Carter's disastrous presidency. But it is more likely yet another example of the refusal of liberals to acknowledge the success of Reagan's Cold War policies: first, rebuilding a disastrously diminished security establishment (diplomatic and political as well as military), then challenging the Soviet Union in a way that surely hastened the demise of the "evil empire."
While Beinart is quite right when he refers to a conjured, mythic Reagan who "never compromised with America's enemies and never shrank from a fight," it is the author, not the conservatives he disparages, who is the conjurer....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
One could assume that the dubious straw men invented by Peter Beinart ("Think Again: Ronald Reagan" July/August 2010) are the result of innocent misconstruction. After all, Beinart was only 10 years old when Ronald Reagan became president and began the daunting task of re-establishing American pride, confidence and global leadership after Jimmy Carter's disastrous presidency. But it is more likely yet another example of the refusal of liberals to acknowledge the success of Reagan's Cold War policies: first, rebuilding a disastrously diminished security establishment (diplomatic and political as well as military), then challenging the Soviet Union in a way that surely hastened the demise of the "evil empire."
While Beinart is quite right when he refers to a conjured, mythic Reagan who "never compromised with America's enemies and never shrank from a fight," it is the author, not the conservatives he disparages, who is the conjurer....