Iran-Contra at Twenty

Over at David Corn's blog at The Nation, "Capital Games," he looks at the Iran-Contra scandal twenty years later and what it means. Some of his conclusions may be controversial -- he argues that many of the officials responsible for aspects of Iran-Contra are now operating in government and are largely responsible for getting us into what he calls the "hellish mess" in Iraq.

But whatever the implications for Iraq, Corn raises important questions about an event that somehow does not earn the place it deserves in the annals of the abuse of political prerogative. My own views of Iran-Contra are quite simple: Of the ignominious trinity of scandals that scarred the last three decades of the twentieth century, Clinton's was the most overblown, the most frovolous, and the least significant in import or impact. Nixon's was a nightmare and will always hold a prominent place in political scandal because of how it played out, the myriad issues it raised, and the ultimate outcome, which was to scuttle the Nixon presidency. But to my mind, clearly the worst in terms of the harm to the United States, the violations of law and Constitutional principle, and in terms of both the national and the global scale, was the Iran-Contra scandal. In an era when we now have a fuller recognition of the dangers posed by terror-sponsoring states, Iran-Contra looks even worse.