Was President Reagan a good or bad President? His domestic policies? Foreign?
There are those here that will make accusations reflecting back on Reagan. He took over during a recession caused by the fall out of Vietnam, Watergate and a weak economic policy. In the eight years, unemployment dropped, tax revenue increased and business thrived. Reagan only proposed the economic policy, but a Democrat Congress followed his lead and vastly improved the economy. Even with the increased spending by Congress, the economy left the recession behind and passed on to the Bush and Clinton years a healthy economy. Bush 1 and Clinton signed into law the 2 largest tax increases in history and yet the economy held firm for the most of Clinton's second term. His foreign policy drove the Democrats nuts, he handled foreign policy with an iron fist while dealing with the leaders with kid gloves. A master at communications, he was understood by everybody, he never talked down to any group, but communicated with respect. He never blamed others for the poor economy he received and he never apologized for his country to despots. He made us proud to be American
Did Bush know that Iraq didn’t have WMDs when he declared war? Did the administration believe there were WMDs or did they just want a pretext?
No, he (and the other leaders) thought that Iraq had some WMDs.How can we know?The UK, USA, Canada and Australia trade military information constantly - not just the finished products, but the raw data that intelligence agents use to work out what is going on. So all 4 countries have pretty much the same info on what is happening overseas. Now, specific units 'dumb down' this information into updates for our politicians. One officer reponsible for doing so in Australia was Andrew Wilkie, who resigned over the Iraq war and now serves in parliament, doing what he can to make life miserable for the major parties.In his book on WMD in Iraq, Wilkie said that "my own assessment had been that Iraq probably did possess some chemical and biological weapons, though not in quantites serious enough to justify war. The apparent absence of any weapons surprised me as much as it did many other people in the intelligence world. There had been too much evidence to the contrary to confidently draw the conclusion that there were no weapons whatsoever." (Axis of Deceit, p 112)Given Wilkie is one of the people who was briefing our politicians, if he thought that Iraq had WMD, then that's the info the pollies would have been getting. (The theme of his book is that politicians were picking and choosing the evidence they used, and ignored qualifiers and the lack of certainty that is the norm in intelligence work. Given that this surprised him, I have to wonder why he was chosen to work with politicians!)