LETTERS Reagan's fault
Sir: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (`How Reagan went above the Law', 8 August) is surely wrong to belittle the Iran-Contra scandal as an invention of the `Liberal Establishment'. It was the arms-for- hostages trade which wrecked Reagan's credibility, and it was Reagan's illegality which scuppered the Contras, just as Con- gress was finally backing them.
And it was illegal. It's plain from the Congressional Record, despite Evans- Pritchard's skewed reading, that the Bo- land amendments were successively tight- ened to stop the Contra war. The `huma- nitarian aid' compromises were not some nod-and-a-wink for covert military sup- port. They came out of hard deals with the Pro-Contra Senate, and the threat of CIA contingency funding if Congress didn't agree on something. Evans-Pritchard is right that the NSC was not specifically barred from aiding the Contras. But that is because no one dreamed it would be turned into an ad hoc version of the CIA: it is supposed to be an advisory council to the President.
The White House secretarial staff weren't barred by Boland either. Nor was Nancy Reagan. But if Nancy and the secretaries ran a war under CIA orders in four continents against Congress's intent, they would have been `an agency of the United States involved in intelligence acti- vities'. In other words, it was covered by Boland. The same goes for the NSC.
As for the constitutional argument, Nicaragua is obviously within the Con- gress's legitimate influence over foreign policy. It is clearly not a question of the `self-preservation' of the nation as Jeffer- son defined it. Reagan and North realised this. Why else did they lie about it?
What good does it serve to apologise for Reagan's most self-defeating error? It took him seven years to win congressional sup- port for the Contras. It took 011ie North seven months to throw it away. The `Liberal Establishment' may be pleased at the fiasco, but it helps no one, least of all conservatives, to argue that it was the liberals who screwed it up.
Andrew Sullivan
Associate Editor, The New Republic, 1220, 19th Street N.W., Washington D.C. 20036
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