How Ronald Reagan Brought Us the 'Islamic Bomb' -- and Hid it From Congress

Both Congress and the public would have erupted, had they known that the price for sticking it to the Soviet Union was for fundamentalist Pakistan to become a nuclear power.

Paul Abrams
AlterNet
February 15, 2011

On the centennial of President Reagan's birth, it may be fine to remember him warmly for all his positive personal qualities, his optimism about the future, and his belief in this country. But it is dangerous to our country's future if we bow at the altar of his policies and follow his example.

Domestically, for example, Reagan popularized the dangerous idea that we could have something for nothing -- that lowering tax rates generates increased, not decreased, revenues, a 20th-century economic alchemy that has produced a $14 trillion national debt. In foreign policy Reagan inserted troops in Lebanon where lax security allowed the first Islamist attack against Americans, killing more than 200 marines. (He then tucked tail and ran out of the country, but no one called him weak.) He traded arms for hostages with Iran, yet no one on the Right called him an appeaser.

Nothing, however, compares with his allowing Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons, referred to, even at the time, as the "Islamic bomb."

(More here.)