Understanding Ronald Reagan's presidential record is important -- but what's critical in 2009 is undoing the mythology that caused America to pursue even worse policies and justify them in the name of the Gipper. In the early 2000s, then-President George W. Bush and his aides often invoked the 40th president in pushing for an invasion of Iraq - something that no one who has studied Reagan closely believes he would have seriously considered.

In my new book "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," and in my initial post here at TPMCafe Book Club, there's little doubt that Ronald Reagan embarked on policies that were a disaster in key areas like the economy - accelerating an era of greedy deregulation and converting America from a creditor to a debtor nation - and energy, where he crushed hopes that the U.S. would be a leader in areas like solar and wind power. You'll likely read here about other ways in which the Reagan legacy has been dangerously distorted - "Nixonland" author Rick Perlstein, who should be writing here later this week, has noted that the "sunny optimist" rose up in the 1960s by tapping white middle class anger and resentment.

But when it comes to foreign policy, Reagan's record is harder to characterize. He clearly wanted to fight communism and expand America's capitalist influence in this hemisphere and elsewhere, but he also had a strong personal distaste for war and killing -- and a lifelong fear that Armageddon was both real and at hand. That led to some muddled policies. He didn't want to spill U.S. blood in Central America and thus resisted a lot of military schemes like a suggested embargo of Cuba and the planned invasion of Panama that George H.W. Bush did launch just months after Reagan left office. But he instead developed something called the Reagan doctrine which meant instead supporting murderous local death squads in the name of "freedom." In the Middle East, his personal anguish that Americans had been taken hostage was the spark for what became the Iran-Contra scandal. Despite his massive and often wasteful buildup of the Pentagon, Reagan was sincere is seeking deep cuts in nuclear weapons and was even influenced by the liberal Hollywood movie "The Day After."

As relates to Iraq, Reagan would have been appalled at the military strategy underpinning the March 2003 assault, the heavy bombing tactic known as "shock and awe." He was extremely reluctant to respond militarily to terrorism at all. In June 1985, Hezbollah terrorists hijacked a TWA jet and killed a Navy diver who was on board. Lou Cannon wrote in the Washington Post that summer that Reagan stunned some of his aides -- like the bellicose Patrick J. Buchanan -- with his unwillingness to use force in response to terrorism. "Reagan, always more tender-hearted when dealing with real people than with abstract ideas, decided that retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed is "itself a terrorist act" -- a view he expressed publicly at his June 18 news conference," Cannon wrote in 1985. He noted that just two days later the president had to overrule a military response to an attack on Marines in El Salvador, and he wrote that "Reagan asked [National Security Advisor Robert] McFarlane whether an attack could be carried out without killing civilians -- a yardstick that surprised Buchanan."

But the Reagan mythmakers - the likes of Grover Norquist, who founded the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997 - made an icon of Reagan's tough talk, not the actual ways he practiced foreign policy. Reagan's "evil empire" and "tear down this wall" speeches have been on a constant media tape loop since that time, so when self-proclaimed Reagan disciple George W. Bush arrived in 2001 he acted as if Reaganesque rhetoric was a workable plan for getting things done. He gave a 2002 speech that labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil," echoing Reagan's phrase while causing real harm to policies regarding all three states. When he launched an invasion of Iraq and the stated goal of finding weapons of mass destruction didn't work out, Bush changed his story and insisted he'd been seeking freedom just as the Gipper had done with the USSR.

In June 2004, the president told the U.S. Air Force Academy that "we believe, in Ronald Reagan's words, that 'the future belongs to the free.'" That was a hollow echo for millions of angry Iraqis who'd seen their innocent loved ones killed in the violence, the kind of collateral damage that Reagan himself not have condoned. And that, quite simply, explains that while Reagan's actual 1980s policies caused lasting damage in some key areas, the myth of Ronald Reagan has proved to be far, far worse.