For those of
you who need a history refresher as well as roster of players in today’s
scandals with familiar themes. kwc The
Swift Boating of America By Greg Grandin,
TomDispatch.com, Thursday 01 June 2006 An illegal war,
torture rooms, warrantless wiretapping, manipulated intelligence, secret
prisons, disinformation planted in the press, graft, and billions of
reconstruction dollars gone missing: just when it seemed that the Bush
administration had reached its corruption quota comes a new scandal. This one
is a bribery case involving defense contractors, Republican congressmen,
prostitutes, secret Hawaiian getaways, Scottish castles, and - wait for it -
the Watergate Hotel. At its center is the just ex-Executive Director of the
CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo,
whose sole qualification for being appointed to that post by just ex-Director Porter Goss seems to have been his ability,
while head of the Agency's Frankfurt post, to hand out bottled-water contracts
to friends and show junketing politicians a good time. Don't fret though if
you are having trouble separating this particular crime from other Republican
offenses. There's a good reason - they're all one scandal, part of the same
wave of militarism, fraud, and ideology that has swamped American politics of
late. While this wave of scandal seems now to be heading for tsunami
proportions, its first swells date back decades. Just take a look at Dusty's
rèsumè. After his zealotry got
him booted from Sears' security and the San Diego police department, Foggo drew
on his collegiate Young Republican connections to land a job in the early 1980s
with the CIA. His first mission was in Honduras, then the staging ground for
Ronald Reagan's secret
paramilitary war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista
government. In addition to his official duties, Foggo helped his old college
buddy Brent Wilkes - the defense
contractor now implicated in the ongoing bribery case involving former
Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham
- bring conservative cadres down to Central America. There, he introduced them
to anti-Sandinista rebels, better known as Contras. It seems that, even then, a
lot more than anti-Communist solidarity was on the agenda. Three of Wilkes'
former friends now claim that these trips included partying with prostitutes. A New Right Mecca
Dusty, of course,
is not the only veteran of Reagan's Central American policy who has resurfaced
to help fight George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." The list
includes John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter,
John Bolton, Oliver North, Robert Kagan, and Michael Ledeen.
They can also be found in the highest levels of the White House: Dick Cheney cut his political teeth in Congress
in the 1980s plumping for Reagan's Nicaragua policy, thundering that any
attempt to prohibit Contra aid was a legislative "abuse of power."
And on the frontlines, James Steele,
who led the Special Forces mission in El Salvador and worked with North to run
weapons and supplies to the Contras, was sent to Iraq to help train a ruthless
counterinsurgency force made up of ex-Baathist thugs. (Steele is batting two
for two: As in El Salvador, such training has produced not security but
widespread death-squad atrocities.) Just as progressives
from the United States traveled to Nicaragua in the 1980s to support the
Sandinistas, militants of the ascendant Reagan Revolution flocked to Honduras
as well as El Salvador and Guatemala, where staunchly anti-Communist regimes
were waging ruthless counterinsurgencies that resulted in the murder of over
260,000 people. Dig a bit into the past of any of the thousands of religious or
secular movement conservatives who came up in those years and odds are, as with
Dusty, you'll find they played some role in Central America. Central America
became a New Right mecca because it was the one place where conservatives could
match words to deeds.
Reagan swept into office promising to restore America's pride and purpose in
the post-Vietnam world. But the complexities of the Cold War often forced a
more equivocating diplomacy on him than he had promised his followers. There
was unexpected conciliation (he befriended Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev) and
deep humiliation (the withdrawal of American troops from Lebanon after a
devastating car bombing). By midpoint in his second term, the Right had had
enough of what they considered Reagan's timidity, condemning their President as
an appeaser and a "useful
idiot" for his
evident willingness to negotiate nuclear-arms reductions with Moscow. But on Central
America, of little geopolitical importance in itself, there would be no
conciliation or humiliation. Based on policies designed and executed by the hardest
of hardliners in his administration, Reagan's unwavering patronage of death-squad states in El Salvador,
Guatemala, and Honduras, and his backing of anti-Communist "freedom
fighters" in Nicaragua gathered the disparate passions of the conservative
movement - of all those obscure Dusty Foggos - into a single mission. It also
turned Central America into a sinkhole of fanaticism and murder. Enter Ollie North
Many of those who
traveled down to Central America were Young Turk Republicans who would preside over the right-wing radicalization and
corruption of the House of Representatives under Reagan in the 1980s and during
the Gingrich insurgency of the 1990s. San Diego Representative Bill Lowery, for example, first elected to the
House in 1980 at the tender age of thirty-three, traveled in the Foggo and
Wilkes Honduran road show, part of a Republican task force organized to help
sell Reagan's Contra war against the Sandinistas to a skeptical Congress and
public. After leaving office, Lowery, who has floated around the edges of every
Republican scandal from the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s to the
recent Jack Abramoff lobbying
case, and is now reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department, went
on to become a top lobbyist, skilled in the art of "earmarking." The corruption
represented by Foggo, Wilkes, and Duke Cunningham is an integral part of what
President Dwight Eisenhower termed
the "military-industrial complex." And it goes hand-in-hand with
war-making. If we didn't have an enemy to fight, how could we justify spending
all that money on defense, not to mention on the hookers and poker that went
with the lobbying parties? But in the wake of
Vietnam, just as Foggo's generation of conservatives was beginning to taste
power, the Democratic Congress, along with the State Department and even much
of the Pentagon, was not in a fighting mood. Congress had enacted a slew of laws, set up
oversight committees, and designed prohibitions to limit the White House's
ability to wage war and execute covert actions. Congress now claimed the power to regulate
presidential decisions related to military aid, arms sales, and the sending of
troops abroad; it also demanded that the CIA inform up to eight committees of
its activities. Banned were peacetime assassinations of foreign leaders, as
were covert operations against American citizens at home. Worse yet, the USSR,
the "evil empire," was proving to be an uncooperative opponent - or
rather, it was being too cooperative, willing to negotiate on a range of security
issues. In
order to implement a policy of "rollback," as the neocons and
militarists wanted to do, one needed an enemy to rollback. Enter Colonel Ollie
North, then an aide to the National Security
Council - and the rest of the Iran-Contra gang. It was twenty years
ago this November that a story broke in the press revealing a secret sale,
brokered by North, of thousands of high-tech missiles to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran at a greatly inflated
price, with the profits laundered through a rogue's gallery of unsavory
middlemen - Iranian
expatriates, Israeli-arms dealers, right-wing mercenaries, anti-Communist
client states like Saudi Arabia, Moonies, and drug runners - to bypass a congressional prohibition
on military aid to the Contras. No One Left Behind
What became known
as "Iran-Contra," however, was much more than an illegal arms deal.
It was the New Right's first concerted campaign to restore to the executive
branch the power to wage unaccountable war, to override congressional scrutiny, and go on the ideological and military offensive in a place where, unlike in Vietnam,
there was no major power to get in the way. Democratic and public
opposition to the Contras, which was strong, proved to be a blessing in
disguise for the conservative movement. It forced the White House to rely on
its social base to execute its "off-the-books" Nicaraguan war, thus thickening the connections
between diverse New Right groups. It created a dense network of intellectuals, action groups,
and social movements, uniting mainstream conservatives with militants from the
carnivalesque Right.
Urbane sophisticates like Ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick and businessmen like Rite-Aid
heir Lewis Lehrman (today a member
of the infamous neocon Project for the New American Century) made common cause
with Soldier of Fortune wet-op lunatics, Sunbelt evangelical capitalists like
Pat Robertson, and end-timers like
Tim LaHaye (who, long before he
hit the best-seller lists with his Left Behind series, was hawking Reagan's
Central American crusade to the evangelical rank-and-file). In Washington, the
first generation of neoconservatives, in alliance with politicized Vietnam vets
like North who took second-tier
positions
in the Reagan administration, created an inter-agency war party that allowed them to move forward with
support for the Contras despite congressional opposition. The shadowy
infrastructure of Iran-Contra, designed to override more cautious area experts in the
State Department and the CIA,
who opposed Contra funding, foreshadowed Douglas Feith's scheming Office of
Special Plans, which cooked the intelligence and helped manipulate the media to make the case for the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. In fact, a key Feith advisor, neocon intellectual Michael Ledeen, who in
the 1980s worked the Israeli angle of the Iran-Contra affair, has recently
helped to rehabilitate his old buddy and fellow Iran-Contra luminary, the
habitual liar Manucher Ghorbanifar,
as a credible proponent of "regime change" in Iran. (There are even
reports that the Pentagon, with Dick Cheney's backing, has just put Ghorbanifar
on the U.S. payroll.) It was over Central
America that New Right ideologues first began to junk multilateralism. When the International Court of Justice ordered that the United States
pay Nicaragua billions of dollars in reparations for mining the country's
principle port and for conducting an illegal war of aggression, Washington
balked and withdrew from the Court's jurisdiction. It was a "watershed
moment," according to legal scholar Eric Posner,
in the U.S. relationship with the international community, one that Bush's
Ambassador to the UN John Bolton
has cited as evidence for why the U.S. should not support the new International Criminal Court. In the field, Reagan's
Central American wars provided a way to reactivate CIA and Pentagon
counterinsurgency operatives, desk-bound since the U.S. was kicked out of
Southeast Asia, coordinating their work with private mercenaries, conservative (often
evangelical) financiers, and a rising Christian fundamentalist movement. So even as the
military high command was taking steps to prevent another Vietnam from
happening by attempting to limit the use of American troops to clearly defined
objectives with clearly defined exit strategies, civilian ideologues and militarists
in Central America were pushing in the opposite direction. In El Salvador, they
were funding the largest nation-building counterinsurgency since Vietnam; while
in Nicaragua - where they were hailing rapists, torturers, and murderers as
"the moral equivalents of our founding fathers" - they were advancing
a vision of military power used not for specific ends but to launch what they
today call a "democratic
global revolution." Watch Out, John Murtha
As does today's
"War on Terror," Iran-Contra had a domestic front, which helped to
normalize the kind of media manipulation, political harassment, and domestic
surveillance that has since become commonplace in Bush's America. Staffed with psych
warfare operatives from the CIA and the Army's Fourth Psychological Operations
Group, the Office of Public Diplomacy,
set up in 1983 and headed by Otto Reich, carried out a massive campaign of
media deception. Working with polls conducted by Madison-Avenue PR firms, the
office provided emotive talking points to government officials, pundits, and
scholars, linking the Sandinistas to any number of world evils: terrorism,
Soviet nuclear submarines, religious and ethnic persecution, Cuba's Castro,
East Germans, Bulgarians, PLO leader Arafat, Libyan dictator Qadhafi, Iran's Ayatollah
Khomeini, even Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang - claims as false as, yet no less
effective than, those now famous sixteen words in Bush's State of the Union
Address of 2003 that pinned the yellowcake tail on the Iraqi donkey. It was through Reich's
Office of Public Diplomacy that the White House mobilized grassroots
conservative organizations not just to supply anti-Communist rebels with arms,
bibles, medicine, and food, but to go after congressional and media critics. Here began the "swift boating"
of American politics - distinct from 1950s McCarthyism in that it was actually
orchestrated and funded by the executive branch. For instance, New
Right militants, advised by PR experts under government contract, focused much
of their work on unseating the congressional anti-militarists elected in the
wake of the Vietnam disaster, particularly those who opposed Reagan's Central
American policy. If
you "cross" Reagan, said a Republican aide, "they're going to carve
you up publicly."
That's what happened to Maryland Democratic Congressman Michael Barnes during a failed Senatorial bid. He
fell victim to a smear campaign organized by International Business
Communication, a Republican PR firm that worked closely with Public Diplomacy
and the independent Anti-Terrorism American
Committee. "Destroy Barnes," said the notes of one of the
Committee's operatives. Watch out, John Murtha. It was also in defense
of Reagan's Central American policies that the various branches of the
country's intelligence agencies joined forces to intimidate domestic
dissenters, anticipating many of the practices - FBI and CIA file-sharing, for
instance - that would be institutionalized by the Patriot Act and the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (filled by
John Negroponte, who presided over the Contra war as ambassador to Honduras,
where he reportedly covered-up death-squad murders). And the logic that today
justifies Gitmo contains more than a whiff of Oliver North's plan to suspend
the Constitution and place domestic opponents of the Contra War in
concentration camps. The Swamp of Militarism
and Corruption
Like the Watergate
scandal, Iran-Contra started out as a small, back-page newspaper story only to
explode into a major constitutional crisis. Yet unlike Watergate, which yielded
a broad consensus regarding the dangers of unchecked executive power,
Iran-Contra produced no closure. The Tower
Commission, appointed by Reagan, focused on procedural issues related to presidential control over the
NSA; Congress's investigation turned out to be a mess; and the Special Prosecutor's inquiry
dragged on for years, stonewalled by the Department of Justice, with none other
than John Bolton taking the lead in playing defense. One reason neither the
public, nor the press, nor the political system ever successfully came to terms
with Iran-Contra was the tendency of reporters and government investigators to get lost in a thicket of conspiracy, to waste their energy tracing the
tangle of branches that they always hoped would provide a clear map of the
crime. Aspects of Iran-Contra were certainly criminal - illegal arms sales to
an enemy nation to fund an illegal war; the use of drug traffickers to run
supplies to the Contras; money laundering; the deployment of CIA operatives to
influence domestic opinion. Yet, in a sense, the
investigators were all barking up the wrong tree. It wasn't a conspiracy at all, but part of a
larger storm of ideological passion, entwining economic interests and political
ambition, that delivered the American system to the New Right. Iran-Contra - and Reagan's Central
American policy more broadly - broke down the tottering levees of a foreign
policy already discredited from failure in Vietnam, creating the swamp in which militarism and
corruption thrive.
Until it is recognized as such, it will continue to suck us down, even as odd
pieces of flotsam like Foggo, Wilkes, and Cunningham continue to rise to the
surface. Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at New York
University and is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the
Rise of the New Imperialism http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=88057 |
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