The Mother of all Scandals
You never can be too early when it comes to an anniversary. It’s barely June, but a quick look down the road reminds us that the twentieth anniversary of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra Affair lies just ahead this November. As Greg Grandin reminds us, Irangate (as it came to be known in the wake of Nixon’s Watergate fiasco) was a kind of coming attractions, right down to its cast of characters, for our own era of right-wing domination, carnage, and now — finally — full-blown corruption scandals. From Vice President Cheney to the new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, so many of the Iran-Contra era scoundrels returned to the political stage these last years for a grim second bow and, perhaps not so strangely, similar results — though this time not on the relatively parochial stage of Central America, but in the oil heartlands of our planet.
tomdispatch.com