The Enablers Of Deceit

I found nary a mention in the news of the fact that today is a rather infamous anniversary (though it did appear on Yahoo, to be fair).

Twenty years ago, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the nation and said that he’d…

“…authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran. My purpose was to convince Tehran that our negotiators were acting with my authority, to send a signal that the United States was prepared to replace the animosity between us with a new relationship.

That initiative was undertaken for the simplest and best of reasons: to renew a relationship with the nation of Iran, to bring an honorable end to the bloody 6-year war between Iran and Iraq, to eliminate state-sponsored terrorism and subversion, and to effect the safe return of all hostages.”

But Reagan was adamant about the following point:

“The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false.”

No, actually, they were utterly true (hostages Father Lawrence Janco and David Jacobsen were released as a result of the transfer). And the funds acquired from the arms sale were used to aid the Nicaraguan Contras fighting the Sandinista regime in that country. And one of the problems with this deal is that it violated the Boland Amendment, which expressly forbade assistance to the Contras.

For more background on the Iran-Contra fiasco which was brought to light as a result of Reagan’s speech, here is an article from George Cave, who participated in the mission to Tehran with Lt. Col. Oliver North and former national security adviser Robert McFarlane, among others. In Cave’s article, one name that figures prominently is that of arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, who we relied on as an intermediary between our representatives and the Iranian government.

As a result of Iran-Contra, Ghorbanifar was labeled as an unreliable source by the CIA, though, as James Risen noted in this New York Times article dated December 2003…

As part of its review of intelligence agencies' work before the war in Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee is also examining the influence of a small group of analysts working for Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy and planning. The Pentagon officials who met with Mr. Ghorbanifar worked in Mr. Feith's policy office.

Mr. Ghorbanifar's involvement caused concern within the Bush administration because it evoked memories of Iran-contra and questions about whether the Pentagon was engaging in rogue covert operations. The Pentagon has conducted its own internal review of the Ghorbanifar matter, officials said.

It can be argued that the person who gave Ghorbanifar more credence than he should have was Michael Ledeen, another conservative ideologue who himself was involved in Iran-Contra as a national security representative and who also was a prominent voice in the run-up to the Iraq War. Risen’s article does not state that Ledeen helped orchestrate a meeting between Ghorbanifar, Pentagon officials and Iranian representatives in 2002 without White House clearance, though Risen did state the following:

Mr. Ledeen blamed the C.I.A. and the State Department for the administration decision to abandon the contacts. He said he was later told by officials that the information provided by the Iranians had "saved American lives" in Afghanistan. He said he believed that it was a mistake to abandon the contacts.

This, of course, is typical behavior when ideologues are given free rein and feel unrestricted by the framework of accountability and checks and balances in our government, as Ledeen apparently did (if Ledeen had a case to make that Ghorbanifar and his contacts had actually amounted to something and saved American lives, he should have made it).

To some, resurrecting the memory of Iran-Contra is sort of like blowing thick dust off a long-since-shelved historical artifact. However, I believe that when it comes to this miserable affair (and it is commonly accepted that this cast a shadow of sorts over the remainder of the Reagan presidency, which wasn’t that great anyway as far as I’m concerned), it is a cautionary lesson in operating outside of government and relying on unreliable individuals that wasn’t learned at all by the current cabal in the White House, some of whom (including Ledeen and Ghorbanifar as well as John Negroponte) are holdovers from twenty years ago anyway.

And the Iraq war, as we know all too well by now, is a much worse consequence of that mentality than Iran-Contra (past, sadly, was prologue for Reagan and Bushco once again).