Ronald Reagan.
Yes he died, not a very nice thing.
But after seeing so many ****ing people on tv saying crap like "he won the cold war... saved us all blah blah blah" it just makes me think, WHAT THE BLOODY HELL!? Have these people no grasp of real events? Have they ever heard of Gorbachev?! He deserves twice as much credit as that nut job Reagan, but of course..hes not American.
And suddenly, Reagan has been turned into some kind of uber-President, despite as I said, the fact he was a nut job, oh and he pretty much made Al Qaeda what they are;
Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know
Reagan's aggression led him to shape our world in most unfortunate ways. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Ronald Reagan created al-Qaeda, it would not be a vast exaggeration. The Carter administration began the policy of supporting the radical Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan who were waging an insurgency against the Soviets after their invasion of that country. But Carter only threw a few tens of millions of dollars at them. By the mid-1980s, Reagan was giving the holy warriors half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the U.S. contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. This sort of thing was certainly done in coordination with the Reagan administration. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was a wild man, and balked at giving the holy warriors ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow the holy warriors to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that the holy warriors would eventually morph into a security threat in their own right.
What about the Iran-contra scandal, in which weapons were illegally sold to Iran and the money illegally used to fund right-wing bands in Nicaragua, was, in many ways, worse than Watergate, and tremendously more constitutionally troubling than Bill Clinton's gropings.
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"At our meeting in Geneva, the U.S. President said that if the earth faced an invasion by extraterrestials, the United States and the Soviet Union would join forces to repel such an invasion. I shall not dispute the hypothesis, though I think it's early yet to worry about such an intrusion..."
Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev 17 Feb 1987
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