31 December 19
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31 December 19
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The story of Jimmy Carter's administration and the shah of Iran tells us a whole lot about American meddling overseas and overseas meddling in America. So does Ronald Reagan's role."
(The Reagan people tried to run the riff that Reagan’s election had scared the Iranians into releasing the hostages. The Iran-Contra scandal took care of that fantasy, but that was five years later.)
Later, of course, in 1991, a former national-security official named Gary Sick wrote an op-ed in the NYT that argued for the existence of a secret deal between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government. If Iran held onto the hostages until after the election, and if Carter lost the election, the Reagan emissaries promised to unfreeze Iranian assets and supply Iran with military hardware for its war with Iraq. The hostages stayed in custody. Later, those assets were unfrozen and Iran got its weaponry. These transactions were treated as coincidental, and most of the foreign-policy community actually pretended to swallow that fairytale.
Sick’s accusations were at first ridiculed as a conspiracy theory, and then they fell into that Washington netherworld of things that people believe but choose to ignore. Two congressional investigations ended inconclusively and, with the arrival of the Clinton Administration, the establishment’s taste for pursuing Reagan-era crimes, which never was very great, dissipated entirely. And come now these documents that present compelling evidence, as if any more was needed, that American meddling overseas and overseas meddling in America are quids to match quos, and always have been.
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