The Iran-Contra affair

More blogging on The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (1989) by Walter LaFeber. This is his summary of the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan-Bush administration. I think the Iran-Contra affair is pretty much a template for the entire foreign policy of the Cheney-Bush administration:

During the summer of 1987, joint Senate and House special committees conducted nationally televised hearings on the schemes. As they organized, a special commission headed by former Texas Republican senator John Tower, which Reagan had asked to investigate the role of the White House in the Iran-Contra affair, made its report. The Tower commission concluded that the NSC staff was responsible for the chaotic policy and that the president was out of touch with the foreign policies of his own White House. The House-Senate investigation confirmed much of the Tower commission's report. North testified that he had largely worked under Casey's direction, but he had also kept the new NSC director, Admiral John Poindexter, informed of the plan. Poindexter testified that he never told the president about the diversion plan. Casey never testified at all. He had died of a brain tumor months earlier and took to the grave whatever he had told his close friend Ronald Reagan about the plan.

North became a hero to much of the television audience for his defense of the Reagan Doctrine, even if the defense meant breaking the law. His attractiveness wore off, however, as second thoughts appeared. North, after all, admitted that he destroyed government documents that might have contained damning evidence. He also admitted that he had made statements to Congress that were "false," "evasive and wrong." The Army Times condemned North for having "paraded a travesty of military values before a credulous national television audience." Retired Colonel Harry Summers damned North and the others for selling weapons to Iran that might well be used against U.S. soldiers, and for itarting down the "slippery slope" by placing their wishes above those of Congress or the president - "for at the bottom of that slope is military dictatorship" in the United States. (my emphasis)

The enthusiasm for North at the time in the Republican Party is a sign of the authoritarian streak among much of the Party base. It also worth noting that Harry Summers is one of the most important advocates of the stab-in-the-back theory of the US loss in the Vietnam War. So it's not like he's "anti-military", even in the goofy, ideological sense conservatives often use the term.

Another aspect worth noticing in particular is that LaFeber describes North's supposed popularity among the public wearing off very quickly. Eric Alterman has pointed out that the mainstream media at the time tended to talk about North's great popularity among the public, even though he wasn't terribly popular with the general public.

And speaking of Eric Alterman, he wrote last year about now-Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the Iran-Contra affair in Contra Gates American Prospect Online 11/08/06.

Tags: iran-contra, oliver north