25 Years Later, Plantu Declares That the War-Monger Ronald Reagan Was Right

Every week, Le Monde Magazine gives Plantu a whole page upon which the Le Monde cartoonist can cover a current issue by reminiscing about the given subject and illustrating it with a handful of cartoons he has devoted to the matter in question over the years — or, indeed, over the decades…

The uprising in Libya gave Plantu the idea to choose Moammar Gadhafi, which brought him back to the 1980s and the conflict which opposed the "Messenger of the Desert" to Ronald Reagan (in the wake of Libya's involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque attended by American servicemen)… Declareth Plantu:

They cannot say that they hadn't been warned, long ago, that Colonel Qaddafi was a tyrant and an international terrorist. On several occasions, American president Ronald Reagan warned the Europeans who… already then… preferred to close their eyes [literally: to look at their shoes].

Well, that's swell — maybe, in 2028 (if he's still around), Plantu will have a page in Le Monde Magazine (if it's still around) on how George W Bush was right to take on the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and how the Europeans were wrong to keep their eyes closed.

Because at the time, of course, all was different: notice Plantu's eternal saliva drop from Reagan's mouth showing how the drooliong president is old and senile. Notice also how the April 1986 cartoon (bottom left) depicts the war-mongering American (from whose aircraft-carrier-like head of hair a fighter takes off) and the war-mongering sheik flank the worried peace-loving (and innocent-looking) European in-between them.