those were the days

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How times have changed! When Obama sold missiles to Iran and gave the money to the Muslim Brotherhood, Congress threatened impeachment. WAIT! I got that wrong. They want to impeach Obama for not implementing Obamacare fast enough. Or for advocating immigration reform. Or for writing the Benghazi talking point. High crimes and misdemeanors all.

My experience has been whenever wingnuts are confronted with Iran Contra, they act like Reagan didn’t know about any of it, even the parts he himself did personally or admitted to knowing about in private documents. Reagan was basically paying back the Soviets for Vietnam mostly by supplying the Mujahedin with one weapon – handheld surface-to-air missiles. These nullified Soviet air superiority, leaving their ground forces at the mercy of suicidal fighters who knew every nook and cranny of the terrain. Sound familiar?

The real problems began after Reagan left office, when his political heir, George H. W. Bush, decided that the Soviet exit from Afghanistan marked the end of having to pay attention to it. Afghanistan was left a smoldering ruin, the deep concerns expressed by the Americans and others for the Afghan people exposed as lies. As the Afghanis, impoverished and left to starve, realized they’d been used by the West as proxies to fight the Soviets, bitterness sunk in. Polygonal civil war and chaos ensued, until the Osama Bin Laden-funded Taliban took over most of the country, and imposed a horrific sort of order.

Their treatment by Bush the Elder in the 1990’s guaranteed how the Afghans would react to Bush the Younger twenty years later – cynically, interested only in exploiting 9/11 and its aftermath, just as they had been exploited as pawns in the conflict between the West and the USSR. Afghanis aren’t people you can fool more than once. We didn’t give a shit about Afghanistan, other than as yet another opportunity to play our cold war reindeer games with the Ruskies. We left their country a chaotic disaster zone with a serious power vacuum and a ton of unused weapons laying around, then acted surprised when it turned out they had a bit of a chip on their shoulder about the whole disgraceful mess. Remind me again how much longer we’ve been in Afghanistan than the Russians? Considering that the last person to successfully invade Afghanistan was Alexander the Great, I don’t know why other empires keep trying, and keep losing, for 2,500 years.

Of course, the U.S. had an embargo in place against selling arms to Iran, and of course Reagan was merely acting to help the hostages because He Cared. When the shit hit the fan, they managed to keep Saint Ronnie well away from any hearings. Just like when W refused to cooperate, IOKIYAR. It’s only stonewalling when a Dem refuses the second dozen rounds of hearings before Issa’s kangaroo court.

Because Democrats in Congress had foolishly called Ollie North to testify before them, his subsequent convictions were overturned because the prosecution was unable to show they weren’t at least in part due to evidence derived from his mandated Congressional testimony. Even scoundrels have the right not to be coerced to self-incriminate.

There’s never discussion of whether St. Ronnie was lying or senile when he kept repeating “I do not recall…”? during his deposition in the Poindexter trial. No mention of how the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan would later become the Taliban and Al Qaeda? Or the Contras’ drug running into the US, which the CIA turned a blind eye to?