The Unraveling of the Reagan Presidency

...Unfortunately, the standard texts on American foreign policy fail to take up the dangers of bureaucratic monads, monads without windows, or perhaps one should say monads without gonads...

...In these circumstances the search for a smoking gun to place at Ronald Reagan's door is as pointless as it is fruitless...

...The locus of power has shifted from the Executive and the Legislative branches to the bureaucratic-administrative layers—one notch down in the formal hierarchy from where real power ostensibly resides, and where in fact the action takes place in the Federal government...

...The various hearings, open and closed, may uncover the details and draw the net tight around one or another member of the President's Cabinet or counselors...

...policy" of nonnegotiation with terrorists was violated, a legalistic veil of nation-to-nation dealings notwithstanding...

...In this particular instance the action was on its face modest enough...

...Although the search will continue for the great Presidents, it is no longer feasible for Ronald Reagan to wear this appellation...

...In the process he has been consigned to the ranks of our recent "imperial Presidents'"—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M.Nixon...

...From Irving Kristol asking the tough (if wrong) question: "Why did Reagan do it...

...The existing structure, therefore, is a set of floating crap games that grease the creaky wheels of administrative procedures far removed from Presidential control...

...To protect U.S...

...it has much to do with protecting the satrapy...

...Not a single bona fide Nicaraguan opposition leader in exile, though, will admit to receiving a single cordoba from these shenanigans...

...What shocks Americans is that their much cherished convictions about the responsibility of government to its citizenry have been dealt a serious blow...

...The lack of response on the part of America's European allies is intriguing...

...Consider the following: • The CIA supplying information to Iraq about Iranian weapons capabilities, while at the same time the National Security Council was providing offensive weapons to Iran in order to duel Iraq to a hoped-for standstill...

...It might well be that current legislation so thoroughly hamstrings the President from making decisions of vital national interest that he must, or feels that he must, resort to independent operators to bail out his policy...

...The American missions to hold communism at bay, to conduct a struggle against terrorism, have dissolved in the transparent truth that Communist troops guard U.S...

...Israeli participation as a third-party conduit indicated as much...

...The broad use of retired Air Force officers (Richard Secord), expatriate Iranian businessmen (Manucher Ghor-banifar), Israeli arms dealers (Yaacov Nimrodi), former State Department aides (Michael Ledeen), Saudi Arabian middlemen-millionaires (Adnan Kha-shoggi), Canadian investors in armaments (Donald Fraser)—all of whom have taken advantage of the interstitial climate resulting from a rapidly unraveling and declining Presidency...

...For it undermines the verities of Reaganism as a populist ideology: public trust in Presidential leadership and a firm commitment to philosophical tenets concerning democracy, communism, freedom, terrorism, etc...

...It now appears that a variety of Foreign Service officers and career diplomats have also been in direct contact with Libyan and Palestinian splinter groups in seeming disregard of stated U. S.-foreign policy toward terrorist regimes and rulers...

...The Canadians claim to have lost their shirts, and the Israelis deny making any money from the Iranian arms shipments...

...That is the deepest cut of all...

...Yet that wisdom created the deep trust, now turned into the feeling that the President's lights are on, "but there ain't nobody at home...

...Real damage has been done...

...The events themselves pale in contrast to their meaning...

...Worse than any treachery or nefarious dealings, the President has shown himself incapable of giving us a unified foreign policy based on principles instead of expediencies— and that is what was promised...

...But Presidential master-minding of the Iran-contra affair—the dread fear of conservatives and the dreamed expectation of liberals—seems remote...

...As the publicity crests after two months of headlines and Congressional committees assume their juridical posture (with more revelations to come no doubt), thedeadly truth is that the United States has increasingly been ruled by satrapies: administrative clusters headed by Donald T. Regan and the White House Staff, John Poindexter and the National Security Council, George P Shultz and Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Ar-endt Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University...

...Far from an imperial, populist or nefarious Presidency, this is rapidly becoming an absentee Presidency...

...In theory they have all reported to and carried out instructions from the President, yet in practice they have clearly operated as lone wolves responsible to the pack leaders...

...oilfield interests in Angola (which are guarded by Castro's soldiers) against America's leading friend there, Jonas Savim-bi and his unita forces seeking to liberate the nation from a Communist-led regime...

...The series of absurdities that have taken place confirm this with pain...

...Oakes believes we are experiencing "the most dangerous Presidency in our history...

...At a time of slow yet steady erosion of public confidence in public institutions, as expressed by declining participation in elections, an Iran-contra affair has the impact of further disenchanting citizens...

...In the special sense of a loss of innocence and a loss of faith in a Presidency that commanded innocence and faith far beyond party loyalties, itmay surely be that Reagan's is the "most dangerous Presidency in our history...

...The trouble is, the laissez-faire axiom turns into homilet-ics in a central administration 10 times larger than what existed in Washington 50 years ago...

...In such a Washington atmosphere, the parts not only become greater than the whole, they become wholes unto themselves...

...Reagan cannot cut his losses or practice damage control, because the cornerstones of his foreign policy have been blasted away by those for whom the conduct of foreign policy is an activity of experts, an activity with no room for the common wisdom...

...He had voters rather than followers...

...In the case of Ronald Reagan, it is the very belief in the person, in the firmness of his value system—whatever opinions some may have held about its quality—that makes the scandal so extraordinarily damaging...

...Indeed, the more names that are dredged up at middle-management levels within the second tier of government, the less likely it is that any direct involvement of the President will be established...

...The American system is democratic in part because it does not easily bestow greatness on its leaders...

...Amid the mountain of reports, documents, charges, claims, denials—in short, in the mired ordinariness of the conduct of government affairs—what was until recently perceived as an extraordinary Presidency by an unusual leader has been reduced to life size, to mortal confusions...

...That these people were working at cross purposes is made evident by the absence of a smooth payoff and/or money laundering network...

...Both were intended to help offset apparent Iraqi battlefield advantages...

...in the Wall Street Journal to John B. Oakes giving the tough (if wrong) answer in the New York Times: "because Reagan has long been deceptive," we have been provided with a moveable feast predicated on a bloated yet benign "populist" President on one side and a conniving President who has "repeatedly ignored or twisted the law whenever doing so has served his purpose" on the other...

...The decline and fall of Richard M. Nixon came and went without earth-shaking incident essentially because the belief in Nixon as an individual was quite limited to start with...

...What prompts my entry into the near-endless Iran-contra literary sweepstakes is not a denial of villainous deeds and preposterous deals, but a categorial rejection that these can simply be laid at the doorsteps of the White House...

...Even a cursory review indicates the total absence of coordination...

...In black argot there is a saying, "The lights is on, but there ain't nobody home.'" So it would seem with the current period in Ronald Reagan's second Administration...

...A better analogy is that of Reagan with the long pull of Republican Presidencies from Harding, Coolidge and Hoover to Eisenhower, in which the axiom was and remains: The government that governs best governs least...

...But their predicament is insignificant compared to the implications of decision-making being in the hands of people totally outside the apparatus of the Oval Office...

...The reticence to speak has nothing to do with covering for the Presidency...

...It authorized the shipment of antitank missiles and surface-to-air missiles to Iran...

...The amazing thing about the Reagan "honeymoon" with the public is that it lasted so long—for six years rather than six months...

...The siphoning off of the profits from the Iranian arms deal through the coordinated efforts of the National Security Council and the contras, or "freedom fighters," in Nicaragua...

...Consequently, the tragedy of Reagan's second Administration is that his very drive—his desire to reduce centralized power, to recreate the wellsprings of a federalism located in the states and municipalities and not in Washington— has backfired...

...On the contrary, it tends to be suspect of all leadership claims...

...Rather, it is to suggest the facts are so prosaic and mundane as to add up to farce transformed into tragedy...

...The additional assumption, however, is that in exchange for the U. S. missiles three American citizens, Benjamin F. Weir, Lawrence M. Jenco and David P. Jacobsen—a minister, priest and hospital administrator, respectively—were released by their pro-Khomeini Shiite captors in Beirut...

...But the current scandal, quite unlike Watergate, is better located in Washington's bureaucratic rather than political realm...

...the Department of State, Caspar W. Weinberger and the Department of Defense, plus several wild-card players who have included Robert C. McFarlane and Oliver L. North...

...Thus, despite the supposed limits of what was actually transacted at both ends, there has been a substantial revision of American foreign policy away from nonsupport of declared enemies of the United States or dealings that would enhance the power and legitimacy of terrorist organizations...

...Here there can be little question that the oft-cited U.S...

...The rhetoric of the moment appears to be without bounds...

...Neither could effectively tip the balance of military power either between the combative nations or in the region as a whole...

...1 would suggest this is a reflection of the fact that rule by second-echelon marginals and hangers-on is so prevalent in European governments as to be taken as matter of course...

...But the marriage has been sundered...

...The analogy with Nixon and Watergate could not be more erroneous or far-fetched...

...Meanwhile, nobodyis saying anything, and everybody knows still less...

...In this respect the Iran-contra affair is the very reverse o f Wat ergate...

...The homespun ideology of decentralization plainly did not, and could not, buck the tides of a bureaucratic-administrative multitude of elites for whom loyalty and allegiance were firmly lodged at the middle echelons of state power...

...The President was unable to reduce the government satrapies, nor has he been able to cope with them...

...That is hardly to speak well of its present occupant...

...It is a safer bet at this stage of the Reagan Presidency that the strategy of bypassing Congress was engineered at the level of, say, William J. Casey and his Central Intelligence Agency...

...Curiously, I think he is correct, albeit for reasons quite remote from those he offers...

...Neither the House nor Senate investigating teams nor any special prosecutor will be able to fix responsibility in the Oval Office...

...mineral interests, and conservative ideologues pass along the ammunition for terrorist states to conduct their business with impunity...

...GOVERNMENT BY SATRAPIES The Unraveling of the Reagan Presidency BY IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ The ghost of Watergate hangs so heavily over the Iran-contra affair—from illegal actions by the Executive to televised Congressional hearings—that writers of conservative and liberal persuasions alike have had little difficulty focusing their attention on Ronald Reagan...

...The CIA running 845 tons of armaments to Cuba from its Miami airbase conduit, presumably for trans-shipment to Angola...