The Salon Interview
Oliver North
The Fox News house pundit and Iran-Contra scandal survivor spars with Salon's news editor over Bush, Clinton, bin Laden and whether his own Contra allies were terrorists.
By Joan Walsh
Jan. 28, 2002 | Post-Sept. 11, ideology ain't what it used to be. In Congress, President Bush got bipartisan, unanimous-minus-one support for his war against terrorism, and while a few prominent lefties opposed the U.S. military campaign, there's no domestic antiwar movement to speak of. Meanwhile, a remarkable number of left-liberals -- SDS founder Todd Gitlin, Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, our own editor in chief David Talbot -- have aggressively backed the war and bashed old allies for knee-jerk anti-Americanism.
And on the airwaves, President Clinton's lone cable-news defender, left-leaning Geraldo Rivera, jumped to conservative Fox News and took off for Afghanistan. When military officials balked at giving access to the liberal news personality, one of Fox's house hawks, Lt. Col. Oliver North, was asked by his corporate bosses to intervene with his former uniformed colleagues on Rivera's behalf. Whatever North did (and there's debate about that), it didn't work -- apparently hawks have long memories, and Geraldo had to high-tail it to Somalia.
But I have a long memory, too, and I can remember when the country was ideologically split over the issue of terror, and over the very person of Ollie North himself. Back in the summer of 1987, when the gap-toothed, medal-bedecked Marine starred in nationally televised congressional hearings over the arms-for-hostages Iran-Contra scandal he choreographed, Americans were bitterly divided into two camps: those who saw the National Security Council staffer as a traitor -- that would be me, and most liberals -- and those who saw him as a patriot.
Iran-Contra was a blockbuster scandal, featuring brazen defiance of the Congress and Constitution and foreign intrigue. North helped orchestrate an elaborate plot to sell arms to enemy Iran in violation of an embargo, in order to free hostages held by Hezbollah terrorists who enjoyed Iranian patronage; giving the proceeds of the deal to the Nicaraguan Contras, themselves considered terrorists by many Americans, in violation of congressional resolutions cutting off funding to the violent anti-communist resistance. The big question, though, was how high in government the conspiracy went. Although North would later famously insist, in his bestselling memoir "Under Fire," that President Ronald Reagan "knew everything," his superiors always claimed North acted alone, and he was eventually convicted of three felony counts, including obstructing Congress, in 1989. But a federal appeals court later reversed or set aside the convictions, and almost immediately North enjoyed folk hero status on the right.
Fifteen years later, Iran-Contra is little more than a trivia question in "The '80s Game" for most people. Whatever currency it still enjoys is due primarily to the zany details that always make for a juicy scandal -- pre-Enron document-shredding parties, National Security Advisor Bob McFarlane's stealthy bible-and-cake trip to Iran; North's comely assistant Fawn Hall slipping secret documents out of their office in her pants; the charming rogue North himself making derring-do missions to Central America. The big constitutional and geopolitical picture was too complicated to be well understood.
Yet Iran-Contra remains eerily relevant to the current terror crisis. Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyeh, the mastermind of the Beirut hostage-taking, is now believed to be a top al-Qaida leader. Iran remains a U.S. strategic quandary, with even conservatives divided on Tehran: should the U.S. reach out to moderate elements or widen the terrorism war's targets to include the country's hard-line mullahs? And even the decades-old war in Nicaragua has re-entered the current debate, with left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy pointing to Reagan's support for the Contra forces as proof that the U.S. itself has sponsored terror when it suited its purposes.
North makes no apologies. Today he insists he was prescient about the need for relations with restive moderates in Iran, and dismisses critics who say that was just an excuse to sell arms to Islamic terrorists in order to fund Nicaraguan terrorists. And Noam Chomsky may laugh, but North insists the Contras weren't terrorists, but "freedom fighters," echoing his old boss Reagan's flattering description of the often-brutal rebels. Some Contras were responsible for civilian "atrocities," he admits, but atrocities happen in any war, including the American Civil War, which the affable Virginian jokes he still calls "the recent war of Northern aggression."
North has made a living out of sparring with liberals like me as host of his own radio and television programs, since an unsuccessful run for a Virginia U.S. Senate seat in 1994. Today, he's a regular Fox News commentator and host of the network's "War Stories," which appears Sunday nights in most cities. He spoke with me on the phone shortly after returning from Afghanistan for the network, where he briefly overlapped with his old nemesis from the Clinton impeachment days, Geraldo Rivera.
I have a sense it's more fun to be you than me during this war.
How?
I'm a dovish liberal who was dragged kicking and screaming into supporting this war, expecting a quagmire.
Oops, that was wrong!
And you're a Marine and a hawk who embraced it from the start. You're happy with its progress?
Well, I'm always happy when we can kill the enemy and not kill Americans. We've killed very few Americans and thankfully we seem to have broken the back of al-Qaida and the Taliban. That's a good thing for all of us.