Missing the Point

President Reagan, straining to cut his Administration’s political losses and restore its credibility at home and abroad, still misses the point. It is not the mistakes that aides made in carrying out his policies that are the issue, it is the policy itself: paying ransom for hostages held by terrorists.

Reagan acknowledged Saturday that “mistakes” had been made in carrying out his policies, presumably during the shadowy moves to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon. That is a great leap toward truth from his original position that reports of the arms sales were false rumors.

But he still refuses to face up to the plain truth that the policy itself was at fault, a policy of making deals with a nation active in state terrorism on the off chance that something good might come of it. The nimblest executors carrying out such a policy in the most flawless fashion--an achievement that his White House commandos certainly cannot claim--would still have been carrying out orders the President should never have issued.

His aides and closest supporters are promoting the Saturday message as at least a tentative move toward admitting basic error that might wipe a small corner of the slate clean. It sounded more like a man saying he is not sorry that it happened, only that the operation fell apart.

Still unanswered is the question of how the White House talked itself into believing that there were “responsible elements” in Iran with which it could do business. Or how it came to be deluded into believing that even if moderates in Iran wanted to do business with the United States, the relationship would go unnoticed and undisturbed by the immoderates who control Iran at least to the extent that they could blow the operation sky-high.

Robert C. McFarlane, the President’s former national security adviser, made a monotonous marathon before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday in an effort to answer that question. He was not persuasive.

Nor did he help clarify what persuaded the White House that the odds of bringing the shadowy mission off were great enough to risk making the U.S. government look devious and bumbling in front of its European allies, the Arab states and Americans themselves.

More than most, the Reagan Administration confuses the world as it is with the way the zealots with which it has filled policy positions insist that it must be. That, certainly, is part of what went wrong on the Iran deal.

The President certainly has not put to rest the “What next?” factor that continues to plague his Administration.

For example, testifying before the same House committee, Secretary of State George P. Shultz said he was shocked to discover over the weekend that the White House had been dealing behind his back with U.S. Ambassador John Kelly in Lebanon, a career Foreign Service officer. As Shultz described it, Kelly was in touch with the White House in what the ambassador understood to be an effort to trade arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages.

Americans have learned many things since the Iran scandal over arms broke. They have been taken on a tour through a shadowy world of international arms dealers and their apparent easy access to the centers of power in Washington. They have discovered how easy it is for a president to demand stern measures against terrorists publicly and deal with terrorists privately. What they still don’t know is why. That is the hardest question because there is no acceptable answer.