Security and Defense Studies Review 2010 Fall ... - Offnews.info

the Iran-Contra affair, one of the most important political scandals in the United States in the latterhalf of the twentieth century, offers critical insights into contemporary debates about foreign policymechanisms and the role of the military. 5 North’s responsibility as an individual, combined withcertain institutional enablers that flourished within the Reagan Administration’s conduct of foreignpolicy, resulted in an inexorable bifurcation between the traditional ethos of the U.S. armed forces—including such values as leadership, discipline and integrity that remain the bedrock training for theMarine Corps–and the foreign policy aims and practices of a conservative administration, despitetheir sometimes conflation in the popular mind. How North interpreted and applied the Corps’official motto, Semper Fidelis, (“Always Faithful” in Latin) while working at the NSC reflected theconflicting demands for loyalty and ethical behavior placed on the National Security Council (NSC)military aide and, in doing so, shed light on the profound differences in philosophy and interestsamong conservatives and within the armed forces as they picked their way through the origins of, theresponsibilities for, and, later, the significance of Iran-Contra.In parsing the story of Oliver North, a complex and often ambiguous portrait emerges of aconservative, anti-communist administration, torn between orthodox and political conservatism, andbetween loyalty to its goals of promoting democracy abroad and to a band of covert operators whoskirted the rule of law at home while proclaiming their fealty to those same goals. The story ofIran-Contra and the role played by North is a reminder of the truths plumbed by historian RichardGid Powers on the nature of American anti-communism, “a complex, pluralistic movement” madeup of “Americans of very different beliefs and goals who disagreed among themselves almost asmuch as they disagreed with communism.” In the case of Reagan’s conservative foreign policy,an anti-communism held aloft by high ideals lived side-by-side with extremists unencumbered byscruple, who—like those of other times, such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator JosephMcCarthy—while “far from being representative of the American anti-communist movement, werefor the most part digressions and distractions,” nevertheless often gave anticommunists the same malodor that equating the history of medical malpractice to that of medicine would give to the latter. 6To facilitate understanding of two variants of a single political philosophy, in this study politicalconservatism is equated with what historian Jerry Z. Muller has called “ideological conservatism,”that is, that which “arises from the anxiety that valuable institutions are endangered by contemporarydevelopments or by proposed reforms.” 7 Muller’s definition of ideological conservatism isparticularly appropriate in the context of the Reagan Administration’s willingness to up the ante inthe Cold War against the Soviet empire; its particular brand of anti-communism synonymous notwith the “managing” of the status quo of his predecessors, but rather “winning” the twilight struggleagainst the Soviets. 8Although sharing Reagan’s tough anti-communism, the military’s institutional conservatism,especially during the 1980s, was more akin to what Muller calls “orthodoxy,” whose defense ofinstitutions “depends on belief in their correspondence to some ultimate truth. … The positive valueascribed to institutions by conservatism contributes to its natural affinity for the status quo, in contrastto liberalism’s innate hostility towards authority and establishments.” In this way, the military can be5”He should certainly have been impeached and removed from office over the Iran-Contra racket, in which he was exposed as the president of a secretand illegal government, financed with an anti-constitutional hostage-trading and arms-dealing budget, as well as of the ostensibly legitimate one” criticChristopher Hitchens complained during Reagan’s centennial. Hitchens, “Reagan was a simple-minded genius” National Post, February 8, 2011.6Powers, Not Without Honor; The History of American Anticommunism, New York: The Free Press, pp. 426-427, 503.7Muller (ed.), Conservatism, An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present, Princeton: Princeton University Press,1997, p. 3. The basic thrust of Muller’s argument obtains even though, writing in at the end of the Reagan Administration, former domestic policychief Martin Anderson heralded the conservative intellectual and political “revolution” as “in many ways … profoundly nonconservative … its truecharacter—radical and revolutionary—for it was aimed at sweeping out the status quo … because its aim was fundamental change in the existingpolitical, economic and social order.” Anderson, Revolution. The Reagan Legacy, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, pp. 6-7.8On this point see, for example, Ronald Reagan Oral History Project, “Interview with Richard V. Allen,” Miller Center of Public Affairs, p. 26.Geostrategist Allen, Reagan’s first national security advisor, related his sense of thrill when Reagan confided in him that he wanted to “win” the ColdWar; he said he felt as if he had been hit with “a ton of bricks. I couldn’t believe it. The hair went up on the back of my neck.”132Security and Defense Studies Review 2010 Fall-Winter Issue / Edicíón Otoño-Invierno 2010 / Edicão Outono-Inverno 2010 / Volume 11