 card number 36 Ronald Reagan just say it don't just say it don't Reagan the puppet card number 36 United States president Ronald Dutch Reagan on May 15 1987 president Ronald Wilson Reagan admitted that private support of the Contras was all my idea to begin with. Reagan saw the Contras as freedom fighters and the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. He saw the Sandinistas as Sylvia proxies who have turned Nicaragua into a totalitarian dungeon. Focusing public and media attention on the real and imaginary shortcomings of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas served to distract attention from the brutal policies the Reagan administration had supported in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Since 1980 200,000 Central Americans have been killed. 160,000 of these were not Nicaraguan. The wars the US supported in Central America are being waged with assassination programs, bombing of villages, forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of peasants and the defoliation of thousands of acres using napalm and other chemicals. The Reagan administration gambled that as long as the US lives lives were not being lost in large numbers the US public would tolerate and support this style of low intensity conflict. As for Iran, Reagan had condemned its leaders as the strangest collection of loony tombs and squalid criminals since the Third Reich. Because Ronald Reagan's supporters largely agreed with his assessment, the revelations the Reagan administration had been selling weapons to Iran was a major blow to Reagan's personal credibility and thus marked the downfall of his popularity. Ronald Reagan, who's the puppet master? Who's the puppet master?