National Security or Cover-Up? : Questionable protests on Iraq-policy disclosures

There’s a compelling, often unarguable case to be made for protecting the confidentiality of government files that affect national security. But not all information routinely stamped “classified” by the executive branch--as millions of pages of documents are each year--truly qualifies as security-sensitive. Classification, now as in decades past, can also serve to shield individual officials, departments or even an entire administration from potential political embarrassment. A lot of classified material relevant to U.S. policy toward Iraq in the 1980s falls into that category.

For some months now Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Banking Committee, has been reviewing thousands of documents on Iraq obtained from the Bush Administration. Gonzalez has published some of these documents in the Congressional Record, though they are classified. Now Atty. Gen. William P. Barr, complaining that “public disclosure of classified information harms the national security,” says no further documents will be made available unless Gonzalez promises to keep them secret.

Barr does not say which published documents weaken or endanger national security. Gonzalez, challenging him to do so, notes that all the material he has made public involves earlier activities, rather than ongoing operations. None of these, he wrote Barr, “compromise . . . the national security or intelligence sources or methods.” What the documents do show, in Gonzalez’s words, is the development of a “flawed and tragic policy” preceding Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990, and leading to U.S. war with Iraq six months later.

Barr’s objections, based on the generality of safeguarding national security, have about them an unmistakable odor of political cover-up. What the steadily developing record makes clear is that the pro-Iraq policies pursued by the Reagan Administration during most of Iraq’s war with Iran did not end with the 1988 armistice, but rather were continued for nearly two more years under the Bush Administration. This policy of favoritism toward one of the world’s more bloody-handed tyrants was based on the hope that appeasement could entice Saddam Hussein along more peaceful paths. That judgment was not just mistaken, which is forgivable, but actively self-deluding, which is not.

Gonzalez and his committee are doing the right thing. U.S. policy toward Iraq in the latter part of the 1980s was a blunder. Now we are seeing an Administration effort to try to prevent full disclosure of what went on. That borders on the scandalous.