Some of the most conservative Republicans in Congress are betraying an icon of American conservatism, Ronald Reagan, and they are so jaded, manipulated, or unprincipled, they may not even know it. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and plenty of others are trying to force the U.S. government to continue to send weapons to Israel, even if these weapons are used against Palestinian civilians.
Once upon a time in America, Republicans were glad to support then-President Ronald Reagan when, on Aug. 12,1982, Reagan stopped the shipment of 75 F-16 warplanes and other arms to Israel, until Israel stopped all shelling of Lebanon. President Reagan saw photos of civilian casualties, including a small baby with its arm blown off, and responded as any human being should.
Aides said that they had never seen Reagan so angry as when he saw the photos of the indiscriminate bloodshed. Reagan ordered his aides to get Prime Minister Menachem Begin on the phone, and upon reaching him, began to “dress Begin down.” Twenty minutes later, Begin called Reagan to tell him that all shelling had stopped. Reagan later said to aides, “I didn’t know that I had that kind of power.” Reagan held up the shipment of the 75 warplanes, Israeli troops completed their total withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983.
President Reagan successfully did this several times, but he was not the only President to do so. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions, and an aid cutoff, to force Israel to withdraw from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, after Israel invaded Egypt. President George H.W. Bush postponed a $10 billion loan to Israel in 1991, to stop illegal new settlements in the West Bank. Today’s war-crazed members of Congress should fulfill their obligation to the United States Constitution, rather than to the imperial ambitions of the British Crown’s two-centuries-old “Middle East policy” of division and death. They should dig deep to find whatever is left of their humanity, stop the genocide in Gaza, and stop kissing the butts of the City of London and Wall Street.
