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What Needs Changing After Iran-Contra?
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13962 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1988 |
1,281 Words |
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Dick Cheney
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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," tinkering with institutions to "make sure" the same problem will never happen again.
The tinkering spirit has never been more evident than in the majority report on the Iran-Contra affair. Since the primary actors were military officers, what's the solution: Prevent any future military officer from serving as national security adviser. Better yet, require periodic reports to Congress about how the NSC works, with a job description for every position. It is hard to know what purpose would be served by these recommendations, other than to give more committees of Congress levers for holding oversight hearings. In fact, that probably was just the point.
Congressional oversight of intelligence is important, and the statutes that govern oversight are pretty effective. Oversight does depend, however, on the administration informing Congress that a significant intelligence activity has begun or is about to begin. In the case of the Iran arms sales, the administration failed to inform Congress for 11 months after the president authorized the initiative. To prevent that from ever happening again, the majority of the committee recommended that the president be required to report all covert actions within 48 hours, with no exceptions.
When a similar proposal was first made to Jimmy Carter, the Democratic president rejected it as unconstitutional and unwise. Even though Reagan was wrong to delay notifying Congress about Iran for as long as he did, I also think Carter was right to have resisted making it mandatory to require notification within any specific period of time.
In testimony before the
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