Reflecting on Will Bunch's commentary on how President Reagan's foreign policy perspectives may have influenced the subsequent Bush misadventure in Iraq, I am grateful that Mr. Bunch has very appropriately differentiated what Reagan believed from what subsequent political figures may wrongfully attribute to Reagan. Reagan was greatly admiring of the commitment of men and women in the military, and he had great respect for its role. It is inconceivable to think of Reagan popping into a flight suit to steal the final scene (which of course the tragically inaccurate and premature claim of the end of "major combat operations"/ "mission accomplished" turned out to be for Bush's contrived carrier landing). As Bunch recounts, however, Reagan sought to limit military involvement and especially to safeguard civilian populations.

For this reason, Reagan did resist extending Geneva protections to terrorists or unlawful combatants. Reagan drew this distinction from his WWII understanding of warfare. Unlawful combatants do not fight in uniform. They are not subject to a centralized command and control. Unlawful combatants hide weapons, and, notoriously, do not observe--as we know from 9/11--any semblance of the laws of war. They not only endanger civilians by hiding among them, they target civilian populations. Indeed, as the World Islamic Front Declaration of War illustrates for al Qaeda, that is its central purpose. These individuals have never been immune from prosecution for war crimes under any convention. They can be captured, and interrogated. There is even common law authority to summarily execute them in the field.

For Reagan, the differentiation of lawful and unlawful combatants was not an exercise of revenge or animus, but the preservation of civilization. The military should only be asked, Reagan reasoned, to direct its aim at military targets and to preserve the lives of civilians and POWs. For this to be possible, lawful soldiers had to be assured that civilians and prisoners would not be taking aim to kill them. As one State Department writer succinctly put the matter at the time: "Civilians who abuse their noncombatant status are a threat not only to soldiers who abide by the rules, they endanger innocents everywhere by drastically eroding the legal and customary restraints on killing civilians. Restricting the use of arms to lawful combatants has been a way of limiting war's savagery since at least the Middle Ages."

In 1987, while I was serving as his constitutional legal counsel, President Reagan rejected a proposed modification to Geneva (Protocol I, art. 44(3) noting that it was "fundamentally and irreconcilably flawed [since it] would grant combatant status to irregular forces even if they do not satisfy the traditional requirements to distinguish themselves from the civilian population and otherwise comply with the laws of war." The rejected Protocol had been drafted by third world nations who were anxious to grant combatant status to liberationists and guerillas who challenged "racist regimes." The draft Protocol unfortunately overlooked the consequences to innocent civilians and civil order. President Reagan foresaw its ill-consequence. So yes, Reagan was "tender-hearted" as Will Bunch notes, by his penchant for seeing and understanding real people, and not indulging abstractions. In this, Reagan was also a wise appraiser of the risks of terrorism for civilian populations, and he avoided them.

By contrast, Reagan's successors were not nearly as prudent or respectful of the underlying reasoning behind Reagan's differentiation of lawful and unlawful combatants. To his successors, the message was simply that the law did not require that the unlawful combatant have the same treatment as a soldier. Unfortunately in the Bush years, what followed from this was not the careful safeguarding of civilians, but the drafting of overbroad torture memoranda, Abu ghraib, covert rendition, and the creation of a military tribunal mechanism that would have been better handled by the Uniform Code of Military Justice or the creation of a multi-national terrorism tribunal for purposes of war crime prosecution. To attribute these excesses of presidential power to Ronald Reagan - as some Bush apologists have done -- is mythological; they are instead distortions of Reagan's thinking.