A Rupert Murdoch journalist takes a swipe at Ronald Reagan
Gerard Jackson
It was inevitable that journalists would raise the phony Iran-contra scandal. Roy Eccleston, Washington Correspondent for Rupert Murdoch's Australian resist the urge (Jury out on the Reagan legacy 7 June). Marian Wilkinson did the same with her President who made Americans feel good (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 June) and so did Christopher Hitchens in his Not Even a Hedgehog The stupidity of Ronald Reagan (Slate 7 June).
In order to gain the release of US hostages held in Lebanon by terrorists, President Reagan authorized a scheme by which weapons would be sold to Iran to secure the release of the hostages.
Money from the sale was used to finance Nicaragua's Contra rebels who were struggling to overthrow the country's ruling Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas who were intent into turning the country into a Soviet satellite.
So what was the scandal? Well, Congressional Democrats sympathetic to the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas had declared the Contra rebellion an illegal war. That was it. People fighting to install a genuine democracy were labeled thugs, drug-runners and murderers while the Soviets' stooges who lived in luxury in Managua were welcomed in Washington as freedom fighters.
The real scandal here is the complicity of the media and Democrats like Kerry, Biden, Leahy, Rangel, Dodd in trying to impose a Marxist-Leninist regime on the people of Nicaragua.
The love affair between freedom-loving Democrats and the Sandinistas ran so deep that in 1984 Congressional Democrats shamelessly sent them an admiring "Dear Commandante" letter which praised these thugs for bringing democracy, Soviet style, to the fortunate people of Nicaragua
Senators Harkin and Kerry actually flew to Managua to assure Ortega, the Sandinistas would-be Castro, that they would do all they could to support his efforts to bring socialist justice to the peasants.
Why didn't the media demand that these Democrats explain why they tried to make it a crime to fund an anti-communist resistance movement that wanted free elections? Could it be because most of the media was rooting for a communist victory in Nicaragua? Well, they were.
Thinking they had a lock on the country the Sandinistas held an election in 1990. They were decisively beaten and once again Reagan was vindicated.
What was overlooked in this so-called scandal is that if it was immoral to fund the Contras, as Democrats like Kerry and Rangel claimed, then it was equally immoral for the Reagan administration to fund Solidarity.
Note: I have a particular dislike for Hitchens. I clearly recollect back in the sixties in England middles class revolutionaries from the local university coming into the pub to lecturing us on the delights of socialism and the need for a revolution, with them leading it.
These were people who had never done a stroke of work in their lives. They had no idea about 12 hour shifts on factory floors, digging ditches or shoveling concrete. They didn't even have a grip on reality. No wonder we only had contempt for these patronizing twits. I still feel the same way about Hitchens.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 14 June 2004