USA

Asiatimes: Iran-Contra, amplified

WASHINGTON - A specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods - particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy - are definitely the same.

Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an "off-the-books" operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon.

They used the proceeds over the following years to sustain the Nicaraguan Contras - US-sponsored rebels fighting Managua's left-wing government - in defiance of both a congressional ban and of official US policy as enunciated by the State Department and then president Ronald Reagan. It was never clear whether Reagan understood, let alone approved, the operation.

The picture emerging from the latest reports about the manipulation of intelligence in the drive to war with Iraq, as well as efforts by administration hawks to deliberately aggravate tensions with Syria, Iran, and North Korea in defiance of official State Department and US policy, suggest a similar but much more ambitious scheme at work.