McCain Defended Reagan, North During Iran-Contra Scandal
Just 48 hours after jumping on the Bush appeasement bandwagon, John McCain is probably regretting his leap. First, it was revealed that the tough-talking Republican presidential nominee was for negotiating with the Hamas government in the Palestinian territories before he was against it. Then Americans learned that in 2003, Mr. Straight Talk favored engagement with the terror-sponsoring state of Syria. Now in his accusations against Democrat Barack Obama, John McCain conveniently forgot Ronald Reagan's dealings with Tehran during the Iran-Contra scandal. Given his defense the Reagan administration at the time, McCain's selective amnesia comes as no surprise.
On Thursday, McCain tried to back up his appeasement charge against Obama by citing the mythical resolve of Ronald Reagan.
"Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain. I believe that it's not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn't sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home."
Sadly, Ronald Reagan did in fact negotiate with those very extremists during the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986 and 1987. Desperate to secure the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian proxies, the Reagan administration concocted a convoluted - and illegal - scheme to sell weapons to Tehran and then funnel the proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras in violation of U.S. law. (The stranger than fiction plot included national security adviser Robert McFarlane's clandestine trip to Iran bearing gifts, among them a cake and a bible with handwritten verse from President Reagan.)
During his March 4, 1987 address to the nation, Ronald Reagan admitted then what John McCain would not now:
"A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."
While Senator McCain "criticized the administration's handling of the Iran-Contra affair" and claimed the Administration's assertion that the Sandinista military campaign was a threat to the United States was ''not credible," during the Congressional Iran-Contra hearings McCain nonetheless defended his party's president.
As joint Congressional hearings into the Iran-Contra affair commenced in May, 1987, McCain downplayed the impact of the looming inquiry. As the New York Times reported:
''I detect no electricity in the air and no surge of anticipation,'' said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who has criticized the Administration's performance in the case. ''Maybe people think the whole story has been told, which is not so, or maybe they're tired of scandal.''
During the 2000 presidential campaign, the New York Times noted McCain's defense of Reagan in highlighting his conservative credentials in the GOP nominating race against then Governor George W. Bush:
"Unlike the governor, he does not support federal financing of the arts. And he voted to convict President Clinton, is strongly pro-military, defended Ronald Reagan during the Iran-contra inquiry and has a long history as a deregulator."
A March 2006 profile in Current Biography revealed both McCain's attitude toward Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal and his empathy towards one of its key perpetrators, then Lt. Colonel and now Fox commentator Oliver North:
He criticized the administration's handling of the Iran-Contra affair (in which officials had illegally diverted to the Contras money from the sale of arms to Iran), though he blamed both Congress and the White House for failing to work more closely on a coordinated foreign policy, and he empathized with his fellow Vietnam veteran Oliver North, a central figure in the scandal. "Some of these people like Ollie North," he explained to Michael Killian for the Chicago Tribune (July 29, 1987), "who saw their comrades and friends spill blood and die on the battlefields in a war that they believe the politicians wouldn't let them win--I think that leads to a mind-set which could rationalize deviating from the established rules and regulations."
Of course, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain is an appeaser. But John McCain is a revisionist historian and a bad one at that. He once believed in precisely the type of diplomatic flexibility and nuance he scoffs at now. And no doubt, John McCain the self-described "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution" stood by his hero Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra crisis he now seems to have forgotten.
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That's some good digging on McCain's latest flip-flopping. Thanks!
Posted by Morgan on May 18, 2008 11:24 AM