No shame

Last evening's Hannity and Colmes on the Fox News channel will merit close scrutiny for contemporary historians still interested in the Iran-Contra scandal. The guests in the early part of the show were Oliver North and David Jacobsen (sometimes spelled Jacobson), the latter was a Hezbollah hostage freed in 1986 as part of the arms-for-hostages deal that nearly brought down the Reagan administration.

The amazing part of the "interviews" with North and Jacobson was the brazenness with which the swap was presented as official US government policy. For Jacobson, the missiles to Iran were necessary to offset the advantage that Saddam then had in the Iran-Iraq war; in his view, if the Iranians were not helped equalise things, Saddam would have scored a decisive victory and the USSR would have invaded Iran soon afterwards, presumably to offset increased US presence on its "Green Belt" southern border. North didn't disagree with any of this, and added that Reagan had told him to "use any means necessary" to free the hostages. Any claims of Reagan and his vice-president, George H.W. Bush, to be "out of the loop" on the implementation of this policy thus seem rather strained.

Is it all ancient history? First, it's still just 20 years ago. But more importantly, many of the major players are still around -- not least Iran and Hezbollah, for whom the assumption became warranted that Republican administrations would always have a back door open when the front door seemed closed. Not so strange then that the current incarnations of the two don't seem particularly intimidated by American denunciations. Finally, it was from this scandal that then Congressman Dick Cheney says everyone should have learned that there were too many restrictions on the power of the President. The rest is his history.

One other thing: it was mentioned during a news break on Fox News that the persons seized in the mysterious Israeli raid on Baalbek had turned out not to be the "tasty fishes" of initial accounts, but nonetheless people who would be useful later in a prisoner swap with Hezbollah. The message would seem to be that hostages remain a key currency of Middle East policy.

UPDATE 23 AUGUST: The Baalbek raid is quietly unwound -- symbolic of the incompetence that marked many Israeli operations, the seized persons were taken from Hassan Nasrallah's house; that would be Hassan Nasrallah, the local plasterer, and not Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader. A month later, they were quietly released.