Putting Iran-Contra in Perspective
Reporters and TV commentators keep asking Reagan loyalists if they are not “outraged” by the revelations of Oliver North and John Poindexter about what went on inside the Reagan Administration. The answer is no.
No, we are not outraged that Reagan Administration officials “violated” the Boland Amendment because they did not. The Boland Amendment simply prohibited appropriated funds from going to the Contras; it did not prohibit American individuals or foreigners from sending funds to the Contras. Those who donated sums of money to keep the Contras alive deserve our thanks for their generous gifts.
No, we are not outraged by the fact that Iran was induced to send funds to aid the Contras. It was, indeed, a “neat idea.” No law prohibited any foreign government from sending funds to aid the Contras; indeed, no U.S. law could possibly do that.
No, we are not outraged by Colonel North proposing the “neat idea” or by National Security Adviser John Poindexter okaying it. We are glad they did it because those actions helped the Contras to keep body and soul together at a very critical time until Congress came to its senses and voted more funding.
No, we are not outraged by Admiral Poindexter not telling the President. Admiral Poindexter believed he had the authority to make this judgment call, and whatever the President says today cannot negate the fact that Poindexter (and the rest of us) believe the President would have approved the “neat idea” when it was proposed.
No, we are not outraged because the plan wasn’t approved by the State Department. The constitutional and political responsibility for foreign policy belongs to the President, not the State Department.
No, we are not outraged by President Reagan’s management style that allowed his advisers to assume this responsibility. The American people didn’t like the hands-on, obsession-with-detail management style of Jimmy Carter (who personally decided every person allowed to play on the White House tennis court) and Lyndon Johnson (who personally selected every bombing target in Vietnam).
No, we are not outraged by the “arms for hostages” revelations, but that is not necessarily to say that we approve it. First, it could not have been exclusively an arms-for hostages deal, since Iran wasn’t holding the hostages, and secondly, the matter of the hostages is a very difficult dilemma for which Reagan’s critics haven’t any solution anyway.
In any event, how we deal with Iran is such an immensely complicated issue that you can get a different opinion from everyone you consult. It’s easy for the armchair “experts” to second-guess a failure with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but we don’t hear them criticizing the successes in Grenada and the Achille Lauro.
We are fed up, if not outraged, by the sanctimonious politicians who are trying to make the Iran-Contra affair a moral issue, a constitutional issue, and a criminal issue. It isn’t any of those things; it’s just a political issue, and the posturing against the Reagan Administration is patently political.
We are also outraged by the way that Speaker Tip O’Neill delayed for months the funds for the Contras that Congress eventually did vote. Congress should be investigating itself, not trying to pillory or prosecute courageous servicemen.
We are especially outraged by the apparent necessity of having to keep secret our help for the anti-Communist Freedom Fighters. It should be our open, declared American policy to oppose Communism and help the anti-Communists.
The President now has a great opportunity to “win” the Iran-Contra investigation IF he puts as much passion into this objective as North and Poindexter did. The President should ask immediately for at least $300 million in aid to the Contras, and push for a vote right away.
It isn’t enough just to ask for the funds; the American people must be told WHY the Contras deserve our financial support. The political battle can’t be won with some limp rhetoric about “democracy” in Central America.
There isn’t any “democracy” as we know it in any other country. The issue isn’t “democracy” at all. The issues are U.S. national security and freedom versus Communism. The President must explain these reasons in order to get adequate funds for the Contras.
The American people will respond to the cause of preventing the Soviet Union from consolidating a Soviet base in Central America in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The American people will respond to the cause of helping a people to prevent the Communists from running their country. And the American people will respond to the cause of preventing a calamity that would result in some 10 million refugees from Communism walking north across the Rio Grande into our country.
Loyalty should be a two-way street. Oliver North and John Poindexter have dramatically and publicly demonstrated their loyalty to our country and to President Reagan. It’s time for President Reagan to show his loyalty to the cause for which North and Poindexter sacrificed their careers by seizing the high ground they captured for him and asserting the passionate leadership necessary to win.
Ollie, We Luv Ya
What a week on television! The first two days, people were complaining that their favorite soaps had been preempted. Then, America’s TV addicts found to their surprise that the Iran-Contra Hearings were high theater more compelling than their soaps.
For weeks, the liberal media and the partisan Democrats had been loaded for bear, sharpening their knives for the Lieutenant Colonel on whom they expected to pin the “Contragate scandal.” In the media, Oliver North had already been tried and found guilty; the only question remaining was to identify the crime.
So Oliver North was summoned into the lions’ den to face a battery of interrogators. The accused was pitted against a formidable array of dozens of stern-faced Senators, Congressmen, their staffs, a forbidding row of hostile lawyers primed to parade their prosecutorial skills, and a bottom row of crouching cameramen.
For two solid days, North was pounded by direct questioning from the House lawyer, John W. Nields. As the hours wore on, however, it became clear that North was in command of the colloquy and Nields couldn’t lay a glove on him.
At the end of the first day, the reaction of the TV commentators was wait and see; it was only a matter of time, they thought, when North would break and convict himself and the Reagan Administration of high crimes. By the end of the second day, big media realized that they had been bested at their own game of television.
Tom Brokaw of NBC pronounced the hearing “utterly fascinating,” and, in tones of unabashed awe and admiration, credited North with scoring “a hole in one.” Dan Rather ruefully admitted that North “speaks the language of Middle America — he’s a very effective communicator.”
Still, they cherished the hope that North would be broken on the third day by the tough counsel hired by the Senate Democrats, Arthur Liman. He, too, started off completely confident, raring for the chance to demonstrate his talents.
Liman tried to patronize North by asking him if the Iran-Contra hearings were his “worst” days. Hardly; not for a man who had survived some really “worst” days in combat in Vietnam. Liman patronized North again, saying, “I’m not trying to trap you.” Who did he think he was kidding? Of course, Liman was trying to trap North! But North skillfully avoided every ambush and came out unscathed. By the end of what had been given advance billing as “cross-examination by the top trial lawyer in New York,” Liman looked like a pussycat who had been dropped in the pond. He never scored a point on the young Lieutenant Colonel.
By the end of the fourth day, America was experiencing a tidal wave of Ollie-mania. Tom Brokaw said that North’s credibility had “grown with every passing day.” Americans have a new hero. The liberal Democrats, who had planned the Iran-Contra hearings as a lynch party to hang Oliver North and Ronald Reagan, are bewildered at the way North turned the tables on them. The whole bunch of politicians and lawyers came across (to borrow Brendan Sullivan’s colorful metaphor) like “potted plants,” just stage props in a great TV drama called “Ollie North Fights Back.”
For seven months, television had given us an unremitting diet of partisan Congressmen and other leftwingers denouncing and deploring the alleged “scandal” of “diversion” of funds to the Contras in Nicaragua. At last the American people were able to see an articulate spokesman tell us that it was both essential and legal to encourage private citizens and foreigners to give aid to the Contras during those months when Congress denied appropriated funds.
North explained to the American people on television why it is both morally right and necessary to U.S. national security to back the Contras against Soviet Communism in Nicaragua. For the first time, the American TV viewers were given a coherent defense of the Reagan Doctrine of intervening to support anti-Communist Freedom Fighters.
As North so eloquently said, “America is a nation at risk in a dangerous world.” In this kind of world, we are glad that we have men who can accept the challenge, salute smartly, and capture the hill from the enemy.
When Allen Drury in Advise and Consent described the final confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, he warned that, in “that fearful peril, only the most iron-willed and nobly dedicated and supremely unafraid men could lead the nation.” Oliver North has proved that our nation can still produce a man with these qualities. Ollie, we luv ya.
What Secord’s Testimony Revealed
It’s too bad that everyone didn’t watch Congressman Jim Courter’s (R-NJ) precise questioning of Major General Richard Secord. Secord was a private citizen at all times relevant to Irangate and had years of experience in secret air drops in Southeast Asia. Their dialogue yields a coherent explanation of the Iran initiative.
The Democrats staked out three theories to explain why the Reagan Administration initiated the Iran venture: (1) the strategic reason, that is, to protect our interests against the Soviets in a critical area of the world, (2) to get the release of our hostages in Lebanon, and (3) to aid the Contras in Nicaragua.
The Courter-Secord colloquy showed that it is customary to try to improve relationships with governments with which we have no diplomatic relations, and to use private individuals to gather intelligence and assist government’s goals. For example, in the 1985 Achille Lauro incident, we would have expected our government to have covertly used the ship’s captain or crew, or the ship’s manufacturer to get the layout of the ship, or a private plane or boat to gain access to the ship.
Courter brought out how, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a TV commentator served as the conduit for critical secret messages between President Kennedy and Khrushchev. Courter told how private citizen Jesse Jackson went to Syria to help liberate Robert Goodman, the U.S. Navy flier shot down in 1983, and how private citizens have repeatedly tried to get out U.S. POWs from Southeast Asia.
Since there is nothing unusual about using private citizens, so there was nothing unusual about the Reagan Administration using Richard Secord to assist in its Iran initiative. Our government could not deal directly with the Ayatollah because he refused to deal with us.
The second reason for the initiative was the hostages, chief of whom was William Buckley, a CIA agent kidnapped and held captive in Lebanon. Our government knew that, under torture, Buckley had been forced to give his captors at least 400 pages of secret information. It made sense for our government to take any reasonable route to get our hostages released. Just because those plans didn’t work is no reason to condemn them; second-guessing with hindsight is a cheap shot.
Was Iran an excuse to raise money to aid the Contras, as some Democrats tried to assert? That couldn’t have been the main goal of the Iran initiative because it was more productive to raise money for the Contras from foreign governments and from private individuals. But the $3.5 million was a valuable fringe benefit. Secord testified that, without it, the Contras “would have been driven from the field and defeated in detail,” and it would have cost the U.S. taxpayers much more than the $105 million Congress voted in 1986 if that earlier aid from Iran had not bridged the gap.
The Hanoi Hilton
The Hanoi Hilton is a movie that all Americans should see. It isn’t jolly entertainment, but it is vital history. It’s the graphic story of how our prisoners of war were treated during their years of imprisonment by the Vietnamese Communists.
The movie is magnificently produced. The camera work is outstanding and the acting is gripping. The history is authentic and accurate, as confirmed by our real-life POWs who lived through the awful experience.
But the liberals and especially the liberal entertainment critics don’t like Hanoi Hilton, and they have savaged it in reviews. It’s hard to remember any movie which the critics have tried so hysterically to “kill.” After you see it, you’ll understand why. The liberals have four good reasons for hating Hanoi Hilton.
First, the movie shows Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi, and how she, Tom Hayden and Ramsey Clark, worked hand in glove with the Communist captors to betray the American
POWs. The leftwing entertainment world has closed ranks and said, how dare you remind us about what Jane did?
Second, the movie shows the Communists as the evil, sadistic, cruel monsters that they really are. That also is documented fact, but the leftwing entertainment world can’t stand hearing this said.
Third, the movie shows a Vietnamese Communist boss boasting to the American POWs, “The real war is not in Vietnam; it is in the cities of America, in Berkeley and on the Washington Mall. What we don’t win on the battlefield, your journalists will win for us on your very own doorsteps.”
Fourth, while the liberals have acclaimed movies about Vietnam that show Americans denouncing our efforts to preserve freedom there, they can’t stand to see a movie about
American servicemen in Vietnam who do NOT criticize America, but instead draw strength to survive from their religious faith and patriotism.
America now has a whole generation of young people to whom the Vietnam War is as remote as the Spanish American War. They need to learn what happened, and that’s why it is important that they see Hanoi Hilton.
The young generation ought to know how Jane Fonda and other liberals cooperated with the Communists in trying to exploit the POWs for propaganda purposes. The young generation ought to learn how our bravest fighting men were betrayed by the news media in the United States.
The young generation should learn these lessons of Vietnam so that never again will our servicemen, who are sent overseas to fight, be able to say, as one of them said in the movie, “People at home no longer care that we’re here.”
Mercifully, the movie spares us closeups of the torture. Most of us wouldn’t even be able to watch what our valiant POWs endured. It was bad enough to see the prisoners carried out of Room 18, the torture chamber. It was bad enough to see how our POWs were humiliated and isolated, attacked by rats and insects, and fed rotten food. Actually, Hanoi Hilton has very little violence compared with many other modern movies, such as Platoon, which has been widely advertised and acclaimed. Hanoi Hilton includes only a few bad words.
There is another reason why Hanoi Hilton is an important movie. It proves why it would be uncivilized ever to put women in combat roles where they could become POWs. No woman could have survived the beatings and torture which our servicemen endured, and having women in the group would have diminished the men’s ability to survive.
A few critics have dared to praise this important film. One called it “powerfully acted, powerfully directed,” another called it “dynamic drama,” another called it “impossible to
forget.” That’s just the point. We must not forget the suffering and sacrifices of these real-life American heroes. There were 725 American POWs in Vietnam, and 2,421 American servicemen are still unaccounted for.
Moviegoers seldom take their orders from the critics. But theater owners seem to. That’s why this important movie isn’t booked into many theaters and isn’t widely advertised by those few theaters that do run it. Give yourself a challenge; try to find it playing somewhere; ask when it will come, and urge your friends to attend. When it is released on video, buy a copy and show it to all your friends.
Memorandum for President Reagan
Dear Mr. President: You have just about half a year before we will be immersed in the 1988 Presidential campaign, and then there will be only a few months remaining of your second term. Here are some suggestions to make the most of it.
1. Seize the initiative on the Iran-Contra affair by going straight to the American people about the need to prevent the Soviets from consolidating their base in Nicaragua, and the need to back the Freedom Fighters in their valiant struggle against the Sandinistas. Explain to Americans on television why it is more moral and less expensive to help reestablish freedom in Nicaragua than to allow the falling dominoes of Communist dictatorships to send millions of “feet people” walking north across our border.
2. Announce your decision to deploy SDI now because it is our best insurance policy against a surprise attack, against a nuclear accident (a military Chernobyl), and against the Soviets’ violating arms agreements. The first duty of the Federal Government is to “provide for the common defense,” and SDI should be the centerpiece of our common defense. When President Kennedy announced his decision in 1961 to send a man to the moon, he captured the imagination of the American people for his “New Frontier.” We didn’t have the technology then, but he knew our can-do society would meet the challenge, and it did. You have the greatest opportunity in history to seize the high frontier of outer space.
3. Announce that the United States will no longer be bound by the 1972 ABM Treaty because the Soviets have already massively violated it. The American people will understand and support you in this decision; they are not interested in arcane disputations about “broad” or “narrow” interpretations of a treaty that is written in an unintelligible style, is disadvantageous to us, and is fundamentally immoral anyway.
4. Veto any and all tax and spending increases. The new low rates in the 1986 tax reform legislation (passed with bipartisan support) represent a landmark attempt to achieve tax reduction; they should be given a real chance to work before the rates are changed. It will not be a defeat when your vetoes are overridden; instead, you will be setting up the liberal Democratic 100th Congress to take a fall in 1988 exactly as Harry Truman campaigned successfully against the 80th Congress. President Franklin D. Roosevelt averaged a veto a week when he was President.
5. Don’t hold any more White House news conferences. They are just a charade in which the Washington D.C., reporters try to upstage you with hostile questions and colorful costumes. No law decrees that the President should communicate to the American people through the eyes and ears of this elite group of reporters who manifest the attitude that they were divinely appointed to put down the President. Since you have already indulged the TV network reporters with more than their fair share of news conferences, I suggest that you schedule all the rest of your news conferences outside of Washington so reporters in the rest of the country can get their chance to ask you questions. Why discriminate against reporters in Columbus, OH, Peoria, IL, or Phoenix, AZ?
6. Formulate policies on AIDS because it will be one of the biggest political issues for 1988. Take the leadership in behalf of policies which protect the uninfected from the infectious. We also need a clear statement that the teaching of “safe” sodomy and fornication in public schools is unacceptable because it is untrue, unhealthy, illegal, and unconstitutional.
7. Continue to defend the private enterprise system because it is the most productive and fairest economic system ever devised. The Administration should vigorously oppose “Comparable Worth,” “Mandated Parental Leave,” and all other regulations that tend to handcuff private enterprise, dictate wages and benefits, or impact disproportionately on small business, which is the source of most of the new jobs that are created in the private sector.
8. Implement the agenda of the (Gary Bauer) White House Working Group on the Family, starting with a proposal to raise the tax exemption for every child from $2,000 to $3,000 per year. Actually, if a child were to be worth as much in the income tax code today (adjusted for inflation and tax rates) as a child was worth 35 years ago, the exemption would be $5,000 per child per year. Every piece of legislation should be evaluated for its family impact, especially whether it includes incentives or disincentives for mothers to care for their own children. By this test, the child-care credit in the current income tax code, which discriminates against mothers who care for their own children, should be extended to all mothers.
9. Devise ways and means of restructuring the welfare system so that the father is reestablished as the head of the family, and as the source of physical protection and financial support. By making the father irrelevant, the welfare system has created a permanent fatherless class in our society, and a social crime which should be laid squarely at the feet of the big-spending liberals.
10. Order the Department of Justice to aggressively enforce the laws against pornography, especially child pornography. The Justice Department should work with the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit pornography on dial-a-porn, television, cablevision, and radio.
Finally, don’t take advice from those who want to hurt you, such as the liberal media. The American people will support you if you appeal to them with the same substance and style that carried you into the White House in the first place.
