OPINION/Fintan O'TooleIt is hard to think about the new year without thinking of the impending war in Iraq, and hard to think of that terrible prospect without feeling that the 21st century has already managed to render unremarkable levels of hypocrisy that would previously have seemed outrageous.
The slow wind-up towards war is being conducted with care and skill. It is not easy to justify a war when there is no obvious or immediate threat. It takes a lot of preparation, a gradual escalation of "our" moral superiority and "their" moral degeneracy.
To the genuine vileness of the Saddam Hussein regime must be added the accusation that it is telling lies. And we must absorb the implication that the US government never behaves vilely or tells lies. For domestic US consumption, there must also be the understanding that anyone who questions this is at best unpatriotic, at worst a traitor. Internationally, the catch-all term "anti-American" will do the same job.
The most profound act of anti-Americanism in the last 20 years, the most serious act of treason against the institutions of US government, and one of the most cynical acts of terrorism, was the complex of conspiracies known as the Iran-Contra affairs of 1984 to 1986.
The US Congress had outlawed virtually all assistance to the anti-government Contra terror movement in Nicaragua. A secret coup against Congress was conducted within the Reagan administration in order to continue the funding of terrorism in Nicaragua. Three men who were part of that plot are now senior figures in the administration of George W. Bush.
Otto Reich is now Assistant Secretary of State for Western hemisphere affairs. An anti-Castro Cuban exile, he headed what was called the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America. Public Diplomacy was a new buzz-term fashioned by Reagan's neo-conservative cold warriors in the early 1980s. It had little to do with diplomacy and almost everything to do with propaganda. The basic idea was to create a climate of opinion within which support for American interventions abroad could be created and maintained. Its advocates described it as "a new art form".
Reich's operation, which was carried on in secrecy, involved among other things the generation of apparently independent op-ed opinion pieces and feature articles for major newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
This was known internally as the "Reich white propaganda operation."
At the time of the Iran-Contra affair John Negroponte, now the US ambassador to the UN, was the American ambassador to Honduras. He was a key figure in inducing the Honduran government to subvert American law and funnel arms to the Contra terrorist movement in Nicaragua.
Negroponte was also deeply implicated in terrorism. In 1995 the Baltimore Sun investigated the US role in Honduras under Negroponte. It reported that a US-trained elite force within the army, Battalion 316, used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."
When, in the New Year, you hear John Negroponte denouncing Iraq's failure to come clean about its weapons programmes, remember that in 1982 alone, during Negroponte's first full year as ambassador, the Honduran press carried at least 318 stories of extrajudicial attacks by the military. The US embassy, however, certified the country's record on human rights in such glowing terms that aides to Negroponte joked that they were writing about Norway, not Honduras.
And then there's Elliott Abrams, director of the office for democracy, human rights and international operations at the National Security Council. Under Reagan, Abrams effectively ran US policy in Latin America. As well as arming the Contras, he supported vicious regimes across the continent and turned a blind eye to massive abuses of human rights.
As Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory recalled when Abrams was appointed, "Members of Congress remember Abrams's snarling appearances at committee hearings, defending death squads and dictators, denying massacres, lying about illegal US activities in support of the Nicaraguan Contras. Abrams sneered at his critics for their blindness and naivety, or called them 'vipers'."
In 1991 he pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to Congress under oath in his evidence on the Iran-Contra scandal.
Abrams, by the way, defined his own lies as "failing to volunteer information . . . in a situation which ordinarily would have called for the volunteering of it." This is probably a pretty good description, too, of the Iraqi arms dossiers.
One set of lies, however, makes you fit to be the free world's leading voice on democracy and human rights. The other apparently justifies attacks on a population that has already suffered immensely. If these are the alternatives we have to choose between in 2003, God help us.