[MestaMachine]

Reagan saved arafat and his plo butchers with all of their weapons. Sorry. Words are useless in the face of facts. That act has doomed Israel to decades of terror.

[EternalVigilance]

Nobody ever said he, or all of his policies, were perfect.

You reap what you sow. That’s as true for Reagan as it is for anyone else.

[JohnBovenmyer]

Arafat and his PLO butchers were backed by the USSR. Reagan was winning the Cold War, but his victory wasn't finalized until GHWB's term. Reagan was prioritizing, and properly so! Once the USSR fell Arafat lost his Soviet nuclear umbrella. It was probably prudent not to push that fact too quickly onto a newly freed Russia we were trying to remake into a friend. The first muslim nuke came in 1998, although Pakistan had been working on them for decades and was then focused on India rather than Israel. Arafat's main defence, post Cold War, was OPEC's oil power and leftist supporters through out Europe and the US. Hardly Reagan's fault.

Reagan did his share of the heavy lifting, solving the biggest problem the world then faced, and left a splendid example of how to resolve the smaller problems he left for his successors. Blame them, not Reagan, for what hasn't been mopped up since.