GATES AND THE UNDEAD. Sometimes, I bore the youngsters with tales of the Iran-Contra scandal, and I scare them with stories of how the Undead -- Abrams, Negroponte, etc. -- from that festival of criminality still walk the earth. Because its crimes went largely unpunished, it's in Iran-Contra where we clearly see not only the embryonic stages of the rogue authoritarian Executive, but also the very worst ways of dealing with it. The investigations of Iran-Contra -- whether it was the toothless Tower Commission or the feckless congressional probe that bungled the job so badly that it provided even Ollie North a loophole to dive through -- were an abject failure of the Great Men Of The Beltway theory of dealing with serious constitutional problems, a/k/a the Lee Hamilton Is McGyver Proposition. Hamilton helped make sure that Iran-Contra didn't too badly discombobulate the status quo, and now he's working on the problem of what to do in Iraq. I am not reassured.
Anyway, the scandal had its deepest roots in the crazy-assed schemes of the late William Casey, who sent the CIA haring off after bee feces on the grounds that it actually was a secret Soviet chemical agent being dropped on Afghanistan. Robert Gates, brought off the bench of Bush family retainers today -- and not for the first time, either -- to save Junior from Donald Rumsfeld, was Casey's button-man within the agency. This might be something of a problem.
Let's see: Hyping foreign threats to meet domestic political goals. Bludgeoning the analysts into giving the Pentagon the massaged intel that it wants. There's certainly no danger of that happening again. This sounds like a swell hire.
--Charles P. Pierce