Covert Abuses Arise From Efforts to Skirt Opposition

On the eve of the 200th birthday of the U.S. Constitution, the Iran- contra hearings brought broad recognition of a dangerous tension between covert foreign policy and constitutional democracy. But the congressional debate about what to do has been a misleadingly narrow one between those who blame the failure of individuals and those who blame the failure of laws.

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Iran-contra committee, summed up the debate when he asked if “this unseemly chapter in our history” is the result of “well-intentioned, patriotic zealots . . . or are we here today because of the inadequacy of our laws and our Constitution?”

Certainly individual character contributed to violations and abuses. Better laws could help. But the underlying problem lies deeper in the content, not the process, of foreign policy. What drives security elites to abuse constitutional authority is the domestic opposition to their unrealistic policies. The pattern is an old if little-recognized one.

Why, for example, was President Richard M. Nixon’s 15-month bombing campaign in Cambodia (a clear abuse of Congress’ war-making powers) organized secretly in the basement of the White House? Not to keep it secret from the Cambodians, North Vietnamese, Chinese or Soviets. The “enemy” was the American people. Nixon knew that congressional opposition would be mobilized to block funding if he expanded the war. Nixon candidly admitted that one reason for the secrecy “was the problem of domestic anti-war protesters.”

Unlike the Cambodia bombing, there was nothing secret about the “covert” war in Nicaragua. The secret was the “private” network that was organized to fund, arm and train the contras after Congress forbade further aid in 1984. The lying and lawbreaking had nothing to do with the Sandinistas; they knew all along what the CIA and the White House were doing. The enemy was Congress and the public. In 1985 and 1986 this same network was used for the arms-for-hostages deal. Thus the secret was shared with our enemy, Iran, and a cast of scurrilous characters, but not with a Congress whose opposition the Administration feared.

If domestic opposition leads security elites to undertake anti-democratic and unconstitutional actions, this bodes ill: The unrealistic assumptions guiding current policy are likely to produce costly consequences and more, not less, domestic opposition.

Since World War II, U.S. policy toward the Third World has all too often been guided by a hegemonic presumption: that we have the right, the responsibility and the power to control the internal character of Third World regimes--in brief, to keep or to get leftist revolutionaries out of power. The basic policy debate has usually been between the “hard” and “soft” hegemonists. The first see U.S. control threatened by revolutions caused by outsiders (communists), for which the only adequate response is military. The more moderate hegemonists see the threat as internal, arising from poverty and repression; they would prevent revolution, and maintain U.S. control, by encouraging political reform through economic development and the expansion of human rights.

The problem is that U.S. hegemony is on the decline, which means that we no longer have the power to impose our control without great costs. Again and again we run into recalcitrant dictators, oligarchs and military officers who refuse reform even in the face of revolution. Unless there is a Corazon Aquino available to moderate the result (very rare), there is little incentive for dropping the hard line. But the hard line is very costly. More than $2 billion to El Salvador since 1981 has kept the left out of power, but there is no end in sight to the bloody civil war.

The central fact is that the world of the 1980s is not the world of the 1950s. A few hundred CIA-trained exiles took only 10 days to install a pro-American government in Guatemala in 1954; thousands of contras have yet to shake the Nicaraguan government after six years of fighting.

It is the very effort to carry out a strategy of control now out of tune with reality that generates increasing domestic costs and increasing opposition to paying the price of U.S. lives, money and moral authority. Security elites, defining this opposition as dangerous to their programs for national security, have an incentive to take actions that violate constitutional democracy, and those who seek to protect the Constitution will prove timid when incantations of security and anti-communism are invoked.

There are, however, policies that would avoid the costly efforts at control, remove the pressure to circumvent domestic opposition and better serve our security interests. The last three administrations have recognized the geostrategic benefits of good relations with certain Marxist regimes. The accommodations that former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance sought in Africa with revolutionary regimes benefited American interests in that region. The widespread support among moderates in Congress for the Contadora and Arias plans for Central America is recognition that less U.S. control would promote U.S. interests there better than the Reagan policy has.

Such an American willingness to face the world as it really is will not only strengthen our constitutional democracy here at home, but will make us more secure as well.