DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Still dancing to Ollie's
tune
By Greg Grandin
A Republican Party on the ropes, bloodied by a mid-second-term scandal; a
resurrected Democratic opposition sure that it can capitalize on public outrage
to prove that it is still, in the American heart of hearts, the majority party.
But before House Democrats start divvying up committee assignments and
convening special investigations, they should consider that they've been here
before, and things didn't turn out
exactly the way they had hoped.
It was 20 years ago this November 3 - exactly one day after the Democrats
regained control of the Senate after six years in the minority - that the
Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa reported on the Reagan administration's secret,
high-tech missile sale to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, which violated an arms
embargo against that country and contradicted President Ronald Reagan's
personal pledge never to deal with governments that sponsored terrorism.
The Democrats couldn't believe their luck. After years of banging their heads
on Reagan's popularity and failing to derail his legislative agenda, they had
not only taken back the Senate, but follow-up investigations soon uncovered a
scandal of epic proportions, arguably the most consequential in American
history, one that seemed sure to disgrace every single constituency that had
fueled the upstart conservative movement. The Reagan Revolution, it appeared,
had finally been thrown into reverse.
The New York Times reported that the National Security Council was running an
extensive "foreign policy initiative largely in private hands", made up of
rogue intelligence agents, mercenaries, neo-conservative intellectuals, Arab
sheiks, drug runners, anticommunist businessmen, even the Moonies. Profits from
the missile sale to Iran, brokered by a National Security Council staffer named
Oliver North, went to the Nicaraguan Contras, breaking yet another law, this
one banning military aid to the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.
The ultimate goal of this shadow government, said a congressional
investigation, was to create a "worldwide private covert operation
organization" whose "income-generating capacity came almost entirely from its
access to US government resources and connections" - either from trading arms
to Iran or from contributions requested by administration officials. Super-rich
conservatives Joseph Coors and H Ross Perot kicked in, as did the Sultan of
Brunei, whose US$10 million gift, solicited by Assistant Secretary of State
Elliot Abrams, went missing after it was deposited into the wrong Swiss bank
account.
The Democrats, now the majority in both congressional chambers, gleefully
convened multiple inquiries into the scandal. From May to August 1987, TV
viewers tuned in to congressional hearings on the affair. They got a rare
glimpse into the cabalistic world of spooks, bagmen and mercenaries, with their
code words, encryption machines, offshore holding companies, unregistered
fleets of boats and planes and furtive cash transfers. Fawn Hall, Oliver
North's secret paper shredder, told of smuggling evidence out of the Old
Executive Office Building in her boots, and lectured Representative Thomas
Foley that "sometimes you have to go above the written law".
Foreign enemies were not the only targets set in North's crosshairs, as later
investigations described what was in effect a covert operation run on domestic
soil, with the White House mobilizing conservative grassroots organizations to
plant disinformation in the press and harass legislators and reporters who
opposed or criticized President Reagan's Contra policy.
Reagan's poll numbers plummeted and talk of impeachment was rampant. The
Democrats thought they had found in Iran-Contra a sequel to Watergate, another
tutorial about the imperial presidency that would enable them to consolidate
the power Congress had assumed over foreign policy in the 1970s.
But just a year after the hearings, Iran-Contra was a dead issue. When Congress
released its final report on the matter in November 1988, Reagan breezily
dismissed it. "They labored," he said, "and brought forth a mouse."
Vice-President George HW Bush was elected president that month, despite being
implicated in the scandal.
Ollie's song
How could the Democrats have failed to inflict serious damage on an
administration that had sold sophisticated weaponry to a sworn enemy of the
United States? How could they have botched the job of transforming a conspiracy
of self-righteous renegades, many of whom not only admitted their crimes but
unrepentantly declared themselves to be above the law, into a defense of
constitutional checks and balances in the realm of foreign affairs?
One reason is that the congressional hearings they called backfired on them. In
the early months of those hearings, Congress methodically gathered damning
testimony and documentary evidence of what many believed amounted to treason by
high-level administration officials, if not the President himself.
But then in marched Oliver North - the crisp marine lieutenant colonel, with
his hard-rock jaw and chest full of medals. Ronald Reagan may have once been an
actor, but it was North's dramatic chops that rescued his presidency.
For six days, the marine fended off the questions of politicians and their
lawyers. His answers were contradictory and self-serving, but his performance
was virtuoso. Many viewers viscerally connected with the loyalty and courage so
artfully on display. "If the commander-in-chief tells this lieutenant colonel
to go stand in the corner and stand on his head," North said, "I will do so."
Never mind that, as Senator Daniel Inouye, a maimed WWII veteran, pointed out,
the US Military Code stipulates that only legal orders are to be followed.
Ollie-mania swept the heartland and Hollywood. Even liberal TV producer Norman
Lear admitted he couldn't "take [his] eyes off" North.
The marine's luster may not have rubbed off on Reagan, but his standoff with
Congress allowed the president's defenders to take control of the storyline,
reducing the scandal's cacophony to the simple chords of patriotism and
anticommunism. Conservative activist Richard Viguerie compared the hearings to
a song: "Liberals are listening to the words, but the guy in the street hears
the music. The music is about men and women who are prepared to die for their
country."
At the heart of the Democrats' disaster was their unwillingness to question
North's militarism or Reagan's support for the Contras, whose human rights
atrocities were well documented. Rather than attacking Reagan's restoration of
anti-communism as the guiding principle of US policy, they focused on procedure
- such as the White House's failure to oversee the National Security Council -
or on proving that top officials had prior knowledge of the crimes.
Much as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry today focus on this administration's
"incompetence" and "mishandling" of the Iraq war, Democrats 20 years ago were
scathing in their descriptions of an administration steeped in "confusion,
secrecy and deception", as well as of the White House's "pervasive dishonesty"
and "disarray." But as today, so then, these criticisms seemed like mere cavils
when the security of the United States - of the "Free World" - was at stake.
In 1988, when Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, in his first
debate with Vice President Bush, brought up the scandal, Bush responded that he
would take "all the blame" for Iran-Contra if he got "half the credit for all
the good things that have happened in world peace since Ronald Reagan and I
took over". Dukakis quietly took the deal, never again raising the issue. So,
when Ollie North jibed that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi endorsed Dukakis, there was
little left for the Massachusetts governor to do but don a helmet, jump in a
tank and look famously foolish.
Along with political timidity, there was another factor that led to the
Democratic collapse on Iran-Contra - careerism. Far more so than today,
Washington was then a clubby, small, inbred world. One of the reasons why the
anger over George H W Bush's Christmas Eve 1992 pardon of six indicted
Iran-Contra figures was so short-lived is that the move was quietly blessed by
ranking Congressional Democrats, including Wisconsin Representative Les Aspin,
who huffed and puffed but let the matter die. Aspin, who had supported aid to
the Contras, was later tapped by Bill Clinton to be Secretary of Defense,
easily winning confirmation with significant Republican support.
Careerism naturally leads to back-room deals. There were rumors that Democratic
House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, who unlike Aspin was an outspoken critic of
Contra funding, toned down his opposition as a quid pro quo to secure
federal funds for Boston's Big Dig construction project - another disaster from
the 1980s that we are still living with.
Unleashing the imperial presidency
But if the Democrats failed to gain political traction with the scandal, or
wring a parable out of it, others did far better. Vice President Dick Cheney
today points to Iran-Contra not as a cautionary tale against unchecked
executive power but as a blueprint for how to obtain it.
It turns out that it was Cheney's current chief of staff David Addington - the
man the press calls "Cheney's Cheney" for his defense of unchecked presidential
power in matters of foreign policy - who, as a counsel to the Republicans
serving on the congressional Iran-Contra committee, wrote the controversial
1988 "Minority Report" on the scandal.
At the time, the report, which condemned not the National Security Council for
its secret dealings but Congress for its "legislative hostage taking", was
considered outside the mainstream. Today, it reads like a run-of-the-mill
Justice Department memo outlining the legal basis for any of the Bush
Administration's wartime powergrabs. It was this report that Cheney referenced
when asked last December about his role in strengthening the executive branch.
The report, he said, was "very good in laying out a robust view of the
president's prerogatives" to wage war and defend national security.
Cheney and Addington are not the only veterans of the scandal to have found a
home in the current White House. Other Iran-Contra notables who have resurfaced
in recent years include Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Otto Reich, John
Negroponte, John Poindexter, neo-conservative Michael Ledeen, and even Manucher
Ghorbanifar, the Iranian arms dealer who brokered one of the first missile
sales to the Khomeini regime.
This recycling of Iran-Contra personnel to fight the "War on Terror" points to
the most important reason it has been so difficult to transform the scandal
into a parable: Iran-Contra wasn't just a crime and a cover-up - as Watergate
was - or a misdemeanor like Monica-Gate. It was rather the first battle in the
neo-conservative campaign against Congress and in defense of the imperial
presidency.
Iran-Contra field-tested many of the tactics used by the Bush administration to
build support for the invasion of Iraq by manipulating intelligence, spinning
public opinion, and riding roughshod over experts in the CIA and the State
Department who counseled restraint. While the original Iran-Contra battle might
be termed a draw - the 11 convicted conspirators won on appeal or were pardoned
by George H W Bush - the backlash has become the establishment.
That 80s show
Today, with that establishment shackled to the most ruinous war in recent US
history, the Republicans, taking a page out of Oliver North's songbook, decided
that the best defense was to go on the offensive, to turn the upcoming midterm
vote into a debate on Iraq and national security. Up until the eve of the
recent Mark Foley scandal, the strategy seemed like it just might be working
once again. The Democrats were losing momentum in the run-up to next month's
elections, unanimously consenting to a distended military budget, and watching
silently as Republicans, with significant Democratic support, revoked habeas
corpus and gave the president the right to torture at will.
Foley-gate, along with a cascade of other scandals, controversies, and bad war
news, may indeed now give the Democrats the House and perhaps even the Senate.
But already there are reports that, if they do take over Congress, their agenda
will have a remarkably 1986-ish look to it: hearings and calls for more
congressional "oversight" of foreign policy that leave uncontested the
crusading premises driving the president's extremist foreign policy.
If the Democratic Party wants to halt, or even reverse, its long decline and
avoid yet again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, it will need to do
more than investigate the six-year reign of corruption, incompetence and
arrogance presided over by Cheney and company.
Progressive politicians who protest the war in Iraq will have to do more than
criticize the way it has been fought or demand to have more of a say in how it
is waged. They must challenge the militarism that justified the invasion and
that has made war the option of first resort for too many American
foreign-policy makers. Otherwise, no matter how many tanks they drive or
veterans they nominate - or congressional seats they pick up - the Democrats
will always be dancing to Ollie's tune.
Greg Grandin is the author of the other book endorsed by Hugo Chavez on his
recent New York visit: Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United
States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan).
