If Krauthammer is right, Obama appears poised to make many of the same mistakes that marked the start of the Clinton presidency 16 years ago, when another Bush was leaving office in the midst of an economic recession and the Establishment (led by its chief mouthpiece, the Washington Post) was nearly unanimous on the need to look forward, not backward.
Then, there was widespread (and bipartisan) agreement with President George H.W. Bush’s pardons of six Iran-Contra defendants, short-circuiting a trial of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger that was set to begin in early 1993. That trial would have altered the historical understanding of the scandal by revealing the high-level approval of crimes by President Reagan and Vice President Bush.
The Weinberger trial also would have put front and center the concept of an all-powerful President. In effect, the Iran-Contra Affair was a way station in the restoration of the imperial presidency, from its collapse in Watergate to its post-9/11 resurrection under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
At its core, Iran-Contra – like its related scandals of secret Iraqgate assistance to Saddam Hussein and the cover-up of cocaine trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras – was a reassertion of Richard Nixon’s famous edict: “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Yet even after George H.W. Bush’s Christmas Eve 1992 pardons of Weinberger, Elliott Abrams and four other Iran-Contra culprits, the historical record still could have been set right if the new President, Bill Clinton, had lent his support to serious fact-finding and meaningful accountability.
Instead Clinton and other Democrats joined in sweeping the Republican scandals under the rug, hoping that they might gain some reciprocity of bipartisanship. As Clinton wrote in his 2004 memoir, My Life:
George W. Bush's gift to the American Republic may be that he has discredited a host of right-wing theories and practices--"trickle-down economics"; "self-regulating markets"; "tough-guy" foreign policy; the "imperial presidency"; and the notion that "government is the problem."
“I wanted the country to be more united, not more divided, even if that split would be to my political advantage,” Clinton wrote. “Finally, President Bush had given decades of service to our country, and I thought we should allow him to retire in peace, leaving the matter between him and his conscience.” [See Bill Clinton, My Life, p. 457]
In some cases, Clinton and the Democrats went beyond simply ignoring lumps in the rug; they joined in falsifying the history and intimidating whistleblowers.
For instance, when the opportunity arose in early 1995 to get to the bottom of the Iraqgate scandal--the Reagan-Bush-I coddling of Saddam Hussein--the Clinton administration didn’t just look the other way; it went on the offensive against people who tried to expose the truth.
The context of this Clinton-Iraqgate cover-up came during a criminal trial of Teledyne, a company that sold explosives to a Chilean arms manufacturer, Carlos Cardoen, who then supplied Hussein with cluster bombs in the 1980s. Another defendant in the case was a hapless Teledyne salesman, named Ed Johnson, who earned a modest salary of about $30,000.
By the mid-1990s, the “official” take on Iraqgate was that the scandal about secret U.S. military assistance to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a “conspiracy theory” and that Reagan-Bush-I officials, including Vice President Bush, had been unfairly accused of facilitating shipments of weapons and WMD-related materiel to Iraq.
A Feckless Report
Solidifying this notion of a “conspiracy theory,” Clinton's Justice Department issued a report on Jan. 15, 1995, stating that it had found no "evidence that U.S. agencies or officials illegally armed Iraq" in the 1980s. The report, however, contained a curious admission that the CIA had withheld relevant data from the investigators.
"In the course of our work, we learned of 'sensitive compartments' of information not normally retrievable and of specialized offices that previously were unknown to the CIA personnel who were assisting us," wrote John M. Hogan, counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno.
Then, without further skepticism, Hogan added, "I do not believe this uncertainty severely undermined our investigation."
But two weeks after Hogan's odd findings, Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official under President Reagan, came forward with a startling affidavit in the Teledyne case.
Then, there was widespread (and bipartisan) agreement with President George H.W. Bush’s pardons of six Iran-Contra defendants, short-circuiting a trial of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger that was set to begin in early 1993. That trial would have altered the historical understanding of the scandal by revealing the high-level approval of crimes by President Reagan and Vice President Bush.
The Weinberger trial also would have put front and center the concept of an all-powerful President. In effect, the Iran-Contra Affair was a way station in the restoration of the imperial presidency, from its collapse in Watergate to its post-9/11 resurrection under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
At its core, Iran-Contra – like its related scandals of secret Iraqgate assistance to Saddam Hussein and the cover-up of cocaine trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras – was a reassertion of Richard Nixon’s famous edict: “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Instead Clinton and other Democrats joined in sweeping the Republican scandals under the rug, hoping that they might gain some reciprocity of bipartisanship. As Clinton wrote in his 2004 memoir, My Life:
George W. Bush's gift to the American Republic may be that he has discredited a host of right-wing theories and practices--"trickle-down economics"; "self-regulating markets"; "tough-guy" foreign policy; the "imperial presidency"; and the notion that "government is the problem."
“I wanted the country to be more united, not more divided, even if that split would be to my political advantage,” Clinton wrote. “Finally, President Bush had given decades of service to our country, and I thought we should allow him to retire in peace, leaving the matter between him and his conscience.” [See Bill Clinton, My Life, p. 457]
In some cases, Clinton and the Democrats went beyond simply ignoring lumps in the rug; they joined in falsifying the history and intimidating whistleblowers.
For instance, when the opportunity arose in early 1995 to get to the bottom of the Iraqgate scandal--the Reagan-Bush-I coddling of Saddam Hussein--the Clinton administration didn’t just look the other way; it went on the offensive against people who tried to expose the truth.
The context of this Clinton-Iraqgate cover-up came during a criminal trial of Teledyne, a company that sold explosives to a Chilean arms manufacturer, Carlos Cardoen, who then supplied Hussein with cluster bombs in the 1980s. Another defendant in the case was a hapless Teledyne salesman, named Ed Johnson, who earned a modest salary of about $30,000.
By the mid-1990s, the “official” take on Iraqgate was that the scandal about secret U.S. military assistance to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a “conspiracy theory” and that Reagan-Bush-I officials, including Vice President Bush, had been unfairly accused of facilitating shipments of weapons and WMD-related materiel to Iraq.
A Feckless Report
Solidifying this notion of a “conspiracy theory,” Clinton's Justice Department issued a report on Jan. 15, 1995, stating that it had found no "evidence that U.S. agencies or officials illegally armed Iraq" in the 1980s. The report, however, contained a curious admission that the CIA had withheld relevant data from the investigators.
"In the course of our work, we learned of 'sensitive compartments' of information not normally retrievable and of specialized offices that previously were unknown to the CIA personnel who were assisting us," wrote John M. Hogan, counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno.
Then, without further skepticism, Hogan added, "I do not believe this uncertainty severely undermined our investigation."
But two weeks after Hogan's odd findings, Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official under President Reagan, came forward with a startling affidavit in the Teledyne case.
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