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What Needs Changing After Iran-Contra?
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13962 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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Date : |
2 / 1988 |
1,281 Words |
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Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney is a member of Congress from Wyoming. He is
chairman of the House Republican Conference and rankling
minority member of the House Select Committee to Investigate
Covert Arms Transactions with Iran. |
The Iran-Contra affair was a story of misjudgment, mismanagement, and interbranch institutional warfare. President Reagan should never have agreed to sell arms to Iran. Instead he should have vetoed the so-called Boland amendment, which prevented the intelligence community from providing direct or indirect aid to the Nicaraguan democratic resistance. Finally, he never should have appointed a person to serve as national security adviser who did not have the judgment to realize it was wrong to authorize the diversion of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan resistance without telling the president.
With all of that said, no set of institutional procedures can rule out the possibility of mistake without at the same time dangerously hamstringing the presidency. Paradoxically, therefore, however many of the mistakes of Iran-Contra may have been those of the executive branch, I find myself more inclined to talk about congressional rather than executive branch reform. Congress' problems did not cause, and cannot justify, everything that happened. Congress did contribute mightily to what went wrong, however, and its foreign policy procedures are badly in need of improvement.
Before we discuss changing Congress, let me explain why I cannot favor major changes in the executive branch or in the laws governing congressional oversight of the intelligence community.
Unneeded reforms
Americans are a practical people, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted a century and half ago. We experience some problem and start looking for "solutions,"
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