THE SPECTATOR
IRAN AND IDEOLOGY
The most depressing aspect of the Iran arms affair — apart from the slapstick geopolitics of the original conspiracy — is the way so many reactions to it seem to be dictated by what the person reacting has thought all along about President Reagan and the conservative 'ideology' he is sup- posed to represent. The more supercilious of his opponents, here as well as in America, have been gloatingly saying, and writing, that they have been proved right: the affair shows at last that the old boy does not know 'what's going on in his own basement'. He is just a figurehead. But most of us have always known that. Not only was it obvious from Mr Reagan's rambling, unscripted answers these last six years, and his preference for the broad brush to any pointillism: but the superci- lious ones have been pointing it out. This affair, then, tells us nothing new about Mr Reagan's way with the presiden- cy. or would it have attracted so much derision from those critics had it been thought to be in the service of a liberal rather than a conservative presidency. Roosevelt was not a great one for details either. After meeting him, Keynes specu- lated that the President might never have read a book in his life. That was as untrue as the rude things said about Mr Reagan. The point is that, when certain apparently disinterested authorities discuss the work habits of politicians as controversial as all American presidents are bound to be, what they say is determined by what they think of the ideology, not the work habits. Not that they always get the ideology right. The Iran arms deal tells us nothing about Mr Reagan's. Selling arms to Iran, to encourage Iranian 'moderates', or to stop Iran eventually moving into the Soviet sphere of influence, can just as easily be depicted as a bit of Carteresque or Rooseveltian naive liberalism, or Nixon- ICissingerian realpolitik. The one thing it cannot be is uncompromising Reaganite opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, and to all enemies of. the United States. Laundering part of the swag to the Nicara- guan Contras is, on the face of it, another matter. Whoever thought of that looks at first glance like an ideologue of the sort often said to dominate the Reagan admi- nistration and to include the President. Probably, the scheme was the work of the `hemispherists': the people who think that fighting communism in the United States' own hemisphere is more important than fighting it anywhere else. But such a doctrine is incompatible with any crusade against Islamic fundamentalism, or indeed against Soviet influence in the Middle East, since it must involve accommoda- tions with America's enemies outside the US sphere of influence. The intellect of Dr Kissinger, as on the occasion of the 'open- ing to China', was much praised for that kind of thing.
Then there is the hostages aspect. It is unlikely that getting the American hos- tages out of the hands of their Iranian- influenced captors in the Lebanon was the main or sole motive of so vast and danger- ous a conspiracy. But those who sold the scheme to Mr Reagan would undoubtedly have emphasised the attractive scope for prime time television pictures of the hos- tages returning just before the mid-term elections.
So we have caught Mr Reagan doing what Mr Carter might have been expected to do. It tells us nothing about Mr Reagan as ideologue. It tells us only that he is a typical American who hasn't got an ideolo- gy. This was already shown by the speed with which he withdrew his marines from the Lebanon when so many were killed and he realised that more might die during an election year.
Far from being imperialists, the United States and her presidents are uniquely unsuited to imperialism. America will fight a great war. It will not endure apparently random death in outlandish parts of the world where the cause is obscure the sort of deaths, on the North-West Frontier, or in North Africa, which were taken for granted by generations of imperial Britons and French.
None of this is said in praise or blame of Mr Reagan, just in explanation. Some of his conservative supporters in Britain are just as unconvincing. Their right-wing Reagan is as mythical as that invented by his critics. And if a liberal President had This will hit the sales of Teflon.' been as confused about facts, dates and countries, we would have heard nothing from them about how such things did not really matter.
Mr Reagan's ideology, then, has been much the same as that of all presidents since Truman. That is, whether it was supposed to be liberal or conservative, there has not been much of it. And in the most important thing for us on this side of the Atlantic — America's willingness to defend us — all have been more or less equally admirable. Instead of British liber- als seizing on the failures of conservative presidents, we should not identify ourselves too closely with causes which are relevant only to domestic United States politics. The job of both is to go on encouraging America to defend us until such time as we can do it ourselves or with other allies.
Neither his character nor his ideology have got Mr Reagan into this mess. All presidents these last 40 years have got into a mess sooner or later. For six years Mr Reagan has avoided his. In that time, Americans have been happier with him than with any president since Eisenhower, the last one to have such a run of success. It is not for any of us to say that they were wrong. Sooner or later some plausible fools or knaves were likely to sell him an idea that would get him into serious trouble. Kennedy was lucky. They sold him the Bay of Pigs early on and he recovered with Cuba. Had he lived we might remember him for Vietnam.
Why does disaster always strike? Mainly because of the scale of the country's responsibilities. It used to happen to us in our heyday — still does, in scaled-down form, if the Sydney courtroom is anything to go by. Also, America has such a fluid social order that the men of government often do not knOw one another very well. A Lt. Col. North or Admiral Poindexter emerges froni such a society and finds himself briefing the president. So does a Donald Regan. It is pointless to be mora- listic about the presence of such ruthless and politically silly men so close to power in the country on which we rely for protection. They are inescapable from the exercise of power in such a society. In other fields, they give it its vitality and prosperity. Unlike in Watergate, however, the President is obviously not one of them, however much he knew. That is why he will survive his mess, and, we hope, recover.
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