Andrew Cockburn, co-author of "Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein":

Somewhere out there, in one of America's secret jails, a prisoner is mourning the passing of an old friend.

Saddam Hussein may have had his differences with some of our recent chief executives, but when the going got tough, Ronald Reagan was always there for the Iraqi dictator.

The liaison can be dated from the summer of 1982, two years into the bloody Iran-Iraq war. Iraq was losing, with Iranian forces advancing deep into Iraqi territory. Saddam was desperate for help, and he found it at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Ronald Reagan decided that Iraq must not be defeated. Almost immediately, despite the fact that Iraq was then on the official list of terrorist nations, U.S. support began flowing to Baghdad, including precursor chemicals for chemical weapons.

The friendship was not without occasional disputes. In 1986, it emerged that Reagan, while aiding Saddam, was also providing assistance to the Iranians. In fact, during a bloody battle on the Fao Peninsula in January that year, both sides were operating with U.S.-supplied intelligence data. Reagan had to apologize to Saddam for two-timing him, make up for it by stepping up assistance to the Iraqi dictator.

There was one last favor for Reagan to bestow on his Baghdad pen pal. After an Iraqi chemical attack slaughtered some 5,000 Kurds in the city of Halabja in March 1988, there were moves both internationally and in Congress to issue protests and sanctions. The Reagan administration quietly stymied all such efforts. That's what friends are for.

In the light of their friendship, it would be only fitting if Saddam, wherever he is, were allowed to join with other world leaders, past and present, in expressing his condolences at the passing of a faithful ally.

Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. COHA research fellow Jessica Leight contributed to his response:

As journalists and Sunday talk show hosts struggle to surpass each other in coining panegyrics for the late President Ronald Reagan, they have hardly touched the Iran-Contra scandal, one of the most significant foreign policy debacles in recent U.S. diplomatic history.

Dismissed by many as a relic of the Cold War era, the Iran-Contra affair in fact represents a crucial -- if at the time almost unnoticed -- portent of foreign policy explosions that would unfold under the tenure of Reagan's ideological heir and reverent protégé George W. Bush. What was later to become reckless aggression in Iraq began under Reagan as the Central American wars of the 1980s, marked by a driven ideology, a contempt for both international organizations and the pesky mechanisms of congressional intent and oversight, and the utter subversion of democratic processes.

The remarkable continuity between the Contra war and Iraq is not merely a coincidence, but rather reflects the return of a host of key players in the Iran-Contra affair, all of whom were discredited in the subsequent investigation by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh.

Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte and Otto Reich, who under the Bush administration have been major figures in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, were key players in sending arms and weapons to the Contras and Central American death squads.

As the funeral procedures continue, analysts and policymakers alike might do well to recall this enormous blemish on Reagan's supposedly "Teflon" record -- and more importantly, with this occasion to take note of the increasing evidence that equally egregious policy lapses in this hemisphere are being implemented by the current administration. The Iran-Contra affair may be in the past, but the dangerous brand of quasi-legal and ideologically driven foreign policy it represents is alive and flourishing.

Steven Hayward, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of "The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980":

Agree or disagree with him, Reagan deserves to be considered alongside Franklin Roosevelt as the most consequential president of the 20th century. Like FDR, Reagan has become the central figure of an era of American life. Just as FDR remade his party and cast a long shadow over the next generation of American political life, Reagan transformed the GOP, and his shadow over our subsequent political course is proving to be similarly long, and may still be lengthening.

He did not achieve all his main objects such as shrinking government. Yet it is a melancholy reflection on the limits of politics that even the greatest and most successful politicians often end their careers with a large note of failure hanging over their head. Lincoln died with the question mark of reconciliation and reconstruction; Woodrow Wilson left office amid the failure of the League of Nations treaty; FDR died, and Churchill left office, with World War II won, but with the seeds of the Cold War clearly germinating. Reagan left office with the Cold War still going, and with astronomical budget deficits that threatened the nation's well-being for as far as the eye could see -- a seemingly long-term legacy of failure.

Yet within a breathtakingly short time, the Cold War was over and the nation's biggest fiscal problem, prior to Sept. 11, was what to do with its budget surpluses. Both events lent a large measure of vindication to Reagan's designs. His huge budget deficits, Lou Cannon has remarked, now look like the wartime deficits of the final campaign of the old war, and therefore as a bargain. Although other leaders at home and abroad deserve their share of the credit for these happy events, it is hard to conceive of their advent without Reagan.

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