Juan Cole: That Time Ronald Reagan Opened Iran and Illegally Sold Khomeini Weapons
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/31327-that-time-ronald-reagan-opened-iran-and-illegally-sold-khomeini-weaponsReagan and the people around him, possibly including George H. W. Bush, the vice president, came up with a clever but completely illegal and unconstitutional joint solution to all these problems.
Reagan offered Iraq some naval and other support in its war on Iran, and ran interference for Baghdad at the UN Security Council when there was a danger that the UNSC might condemn Iraq for using chemical weapons on Iranian troops at the front.
At the same time, to prolong the war and make sure no regional power obtained an absolute victory, Reagan shared satellite photos of Iraqi positions with Iran. On the advice of Israeli official David Kimche, he sent his national security adviser Bud McFarlane to try to establish relations with Khomenei and with then Speaker of Parliament Akbar Rafsanjani. McFarlane brought a Bible and a cake in the shape of a key to symbolize Reagan’s hope of opening Iran.
Then Reagan had his people steal hundreds of T.O.W. anti-tank missiles from the Pentagon warehouses and illegally ship them to Khomeini’s Iran, then on the US terrorist watch-list.
Let me just underline this. Reagan was prevented by law from selling US weaponry to Iran, and certainly without notifying Congress under the Arms Export Act. There was no aboveboard, legitimate way to do this. So he just had his people pilfer expensive weaponry and ship it to Iran. A notorious Israeli arms dealer was the intermediary.
Note, too, just for the annals of perfidy, that Reagan was at the same time militarily supporting Iraq, and had told Baghdad they were his allies.
Reagan, being a fiscal conservative, made Khomeini pay for the weaponry. Reagan then put that money in secret Swiss bank accounts and gradually sent it to the Nicaragua right wing death squads. That was how he got around the Boland Amendment. He didn’t use US government money for this purpose. It was Khomeini’s money.
In return for the American weapons, Iran agreed to pressure the Lebanese Shiites to let US hostages go, solving a PR problem for the US Republican Party.
See also--
Oppose the Deal With Iran? What About Iran-Contra?
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/31319-focus-oppose-the-deal-with-iran-what-about-iran-contra
So let’s compare: Selling weapons to our number one enemy at the time (remember, Reagan was signing treaties with the Soviet Union; after all, they had a new leader who created an opening for negotiations, unlike … wait, Iran had a new leader who took office when the negotiations started) ... Compare that to easing economic sanctions in exchange for putting the skids on Iran’s nuclear program.
Let’s also remember that the funds from the arms sales to Iran were funneled into a covert program to illegally arm the Contras in Nicaragua, who were explicitly banned from receiving support by Congress. Now remember, the supreme ruler in Iran when Reagan and Bush sold weapons to Iran was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called the US government the Great Satan. His successor, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is more of pragmatist.
Also consider that President Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatist elected in 2013, was the opening Obama needed to start negotiations. Of course, Rouhani would not have been able to make a deal without the backing of the Ayatollah.
Senator Ted Cruz talks in his stump speeches about the hostages being released by Iran hours after Reagan was sworn in as president. What he doesn’t tell his supporters is why. He paints a picture of Reagan as a strong leader whom Iran feared. The truth is that Reagan was the leader who negotiated with terrorists to delay and finally obtain their release.
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said the deal equals a “death sentence for the state of Israel.” Really Lindsey? I guess you thought it was better that we sold weapons to Iran than to delay the development of a nuclear weapon there. And let’s also remember that Israel refuses to allow its nuclear weapons program to be monitored.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Win-Win for Iran Contra.
How Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush became boss while Ronnie could get blame, er, "credit"...
George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, [font color="red"]the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.[/font color]
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
SNIP...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
[font color="red"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40
Thank you for an infinitely important OP, eridani. Democracy is what we lost during the last half of the 20th century. DU helps bring it back.
