The Trial of Oliver North
Peter Schultz
It is important to understand how the trial of Oliver North, and others, were part of a cover up regarding Iran-Contra. But it is important to understand that what was being covered up was that the default position, so to speak, of politics and government is failure. This is always what needs to be covered up. And turning politicians and bureaucrats (both civilian and military) into criminals serves that cause. How and why? At least two reasons.
Criminals like North can claim, quite truthfully, that they were well-intentioned. This is what North did, turning himself into a hero when he testified before Congress. But in fact, almost all criminals are well-intentioned insofar as, ala’ Tony Soprano or Michael Corleone, they do what they do for their own well-being and the well-being of their families and their friends. Malcolm Little, as small-time hood, was a better American, seeking status, wealth, and some excitement, than he was after he became Malcolm X, black revolutionary seeking to change American politics and society.
In the movie, Traffic, there is a revealing scene where the father and the boyfriend are looking for the father’s daughter in the ghetto. The father remarks how shocking life is in the ghetto, but the boyfriend shuts him up by pointing out that the social and economic order worked quite well for those involved, so well that if it were transported to the father’s toney neighborhood, young people would adopt it readily, and give up “going to law school” and other such endeavors. In other words, ghetto youths and wealthy youths are not all that different as they have the same motivations, the same intentions and, so, their alleged differences are not real. They are contrived to justify a War on Drugs.
Secondly, criminals are arrested, charged, and tried for certain activities, which means that they actually did somethings, did them successfully. Their actions are criminal, but they accomplished things, e.g., they built Las Vegas, they created vast and immensely wealthy drug cartels composed of huge economies and powerful players. Being a criminal means being competent. Whereas Reagan, North, Bush, et. al., were, as politicians, incompetent as they achieved via Iran Contra virtually nothing. Charging or treating them as criminals hides their incompetence, their failures.
So, politicians and bureaucrats must practice deception in order to hide their incompetence. But, more importantly, they must practice deception to hide the fact that failure is the default position of politics and government. Why is that so? Because the political arena is composed of the real and the contrived, of the real and the fantastical, of the real and the illusionary.
Take the War on Drugs: The drugs are real, but the dealers and users are not real. That is, they are real people, but they are not the people we think they are. As Traffic illustrates, the users are members of our own families and, so, as Michael Douglas’s character says when he quits being drug czar, a war on drugs is actually a war on our families and he didn’t want or know how to do that.
Or consider the war in Vietnam. Vietnam was real but South Vietnam was not. It was not a real country with a real government or a real army. South Vietnam was an American fantasy, an illusion, which led American elites to be delusional, cruelly delusional.
When you deal in illusions, you are bound to fail or to make things worse. It is difficult to call the Vietnam war “pro-American” because it left the United States demoralized and weaker militarily and economically than it had been before the US took over the war. Ditto the War on Drugs, which led to a war on families and to mass incarceration, which gave the United States to one of the largest prison populations, per capita, on the planet. If that’s success, it is a strange definition of success. It certainly should not be described as “pro-American.”
And how was the Vietnam war “anti-Communist” when the North Vietnamese economy actually grew during the American bombing campaigns? Moreover, the war solidified the relations between the Vietnamese, the Russians, and the Chinese, thereby unifying the Communist “world.” And the Chinese and the Russians sacrificed exactly zero soldiers in that war. Again, if that is considered successful “anti-Communism,” it is a strange definition of success.
These are the failures that need to be covered up. More importantly, the fact that failure is default position of the political, that failure in intrinsic to politics must be covered up. It would be quite significant if people realized that despite them thinking that ordinarily politics succeeds, the reverse was the case, viz., that politics and government ordinarily fail.
Consider two books in this regard: Why Empires Always Fail and Seeing Like a State. The former points out, with a wide-ranging history of empires, both ancient and recent, that empires always fail and always are based on and embrace inhuman cruelty. The latter points out that government projects almost never succeed and certainly don’t succeed without extraneous, i.e., unplanned measures occurring.
By criminalizing Ollie North, the establishment allowed him to successfully play the role of hero and to appear as something other than an incompetent, shallow Marine. And that, of course, is how we don’t want to think of our warrior Marines. It would be too revealing. But, more importantly, criminalizing North was a way to hide the fact that the default position of politics is failure. And this is, perhaps, the most important cover-up of all.
