The Long Shadow Of Iran Contra - By Charles P. Pierce
NOV 25, 2013
The Long Shadow Of Iran Contra
By Charles P. Pierce at 9:00am
I am a simple man. Years ago, I made it a policy of mine that I would approve of any deal with Iran so long as it didn't involve selling missiles to the mullahs. I developed this policy in January of 1981, when I was in Washington covering the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, and the Iranians, in one last attempt to stick it to Jimmy Carter, refused to release the remaining American hostages until Reagan had taken office. Almost immediately, the propagandists in the employ of the new president started floating to a credulous media that the Iranians had done so because they were terrified of the awesome awesomeness of Ronald Reagan. Turns out, of course, that they did it in exchange for Reagan's unfreezing their American assets and also because Reagan's people opened up a yard sale at the Pentagon where the Iranians could get good deals on TOW missiles. Ronald Reagan, as we all know, would never negotiate with -- let alone sell weapons to -- nations that sponsored terrorism. That is why Ronald Reagan was a great man who has many large and ugly buildings named after him.
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Consequently, I am very happy with the deal struck over the weekend between certain western powers and Iran as regards the latter's nuclear programs. Nobody is selling weapons to a country that sponsored the killing of our Marines. (Also, nobody is flying around the world acting like a jackass carrying a Bible and a cake shaped like a key. Bonus!) To me, this makes this a good deal, but the bar is obviously set pretty low. Call it the Ollie North Meridian. Also, consequently, I am less than saddened by the howling of the Republicans, especially those who were old enough to have been around when Reagan and his people sold those missiles and who never have purged their party's foreign-policy establishment of the people who thought it was a swell idea. (The Bush State Department, especially the parts of it that dealt with Central America and the Middle East, was like an Iran-Contra Old-Timers Game. Recall especially that the egregious "minority report" of the congressional Iran-Contra investigation -- the report that pretty much argued that Reagan could've sold the missiles to Khomeini personally -- was written by a rising young authoritarian lycanthrope named Richard Cheney.) Nor am I particularly saddened by the various Democrats -- Chuck Schumer, come on down! -- who are posturing for the cameras. Suffice it to say I never really cared what Bibi Netanyahu's opinion was on anything.
Iran is what we still had for a Soviet Union after the wall fell. We had "terrorism," but that was a vague notion. We were fighting a tactic. We had "radical Islamic fundamentalism," but then we always needed the Saudis, so we looked a little silly, even after the attacks of September 11. What was left was Iran, which already had committed an act of war by seizing our embassy. Because we have been on something of a martial footing as a nation one way or another since we decided we were a World Power at the end of the 19th century, we always needed a potential enemy, a war in prospect. Iran was our war in prospect for almost 30 years. Which is why the monumental hypocrisy and double-dealing between elements of the United States government and Iran was such an offense against democratic self-government. We were being ginned up for a war in prospect while Nixon and Kissinger were arming both sides in the bloody Iran-Iraq War, and while the Reaganauts were selling armaments to our "sworn enemies," and while all sorts of backroom deals were being cut with all sorts of backroom operators -- The fact that the name Manuchar Ghorbanifar has yet to surface in connection with this deal is the upset of the decade -- all of whom had their own interests, and not the interests of the United States, at heart. In fact, there is a kind of king irony in the fact that it was Secretary of State John Kerry who played such a major role in brokering this deal. It was Kerry who, as a senator, led several investigations into the dark money that financed this foolishness -- most notably, the activities of the Bank Of Credit and Commerce International, which was a probe that endeared Kerry to almost nobody in official Washington.
To me, the unsatisfactory denouement to Iran-Contra remains the great lost opportunity a) to rein in the executive branch's ability to conduct off-the-books imperial adventurism, and b) to break the power of the neoconservative intelligentsia in matters of foreign policy, especially in west Asia. A few criminal complaints that stuck -- and an impeachment inquiry into both the president and vice-president -- would have done the job nicely. Alas, the very serious people of the day assumed we were all made of spun sugar and far too delicate to know precisely how criminal our leaders had become. This treaty represents a new paradigm, a rejection of what had become the old norms, some of which were downright idiotic. It is possible that this treaty, and what may or may not come after it, signals an end to that long era of covert adventurism and criminal mischief. If that is the case, then this deal is more than worth the inevitable caterwauling that already has erupted. At least, Kerry didn't get on the plane with TOW missiles and a cake.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/iran-nuclear-programs-deal-112513
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