I’m not familiar enough with their tactics to decide if they are or not. Although the definition of a terrorist is very subjective. It would be more accurate to call terrorists paramilitary if they are connected to a state or are acting in support of a state in exile, as the French resistance were.
The contras made exactly those claims.
Incidentally, I don’t mean to come across as endorsing or supporting them.
What you are asserting amounts to the position state sponsored terrorism cannot exist. I disagree.
The US was funding the Contras to wage terrorism against Nicaragua and its democratically elected government. So, you have a point as far as it goes, we were not negotiating with enemy terrorists: we bought and paid for a terrorist group for our own purposes. We were the bad guys.
States can, indeed, be sponsors of terrorism. The question is, whether the Iran-Contra affair involved negotiations with Iran over their use of terror tactics. I’m not familiar enough with that whole scandal to remember.
For instance, if we negotiate with Iran to curtail its nuclear weapons program, we are not negotiating with them as terrorists. We are negotiating with then as a state.
The situation in Nicaragua was not exactly so clear cut. The contras weren’t all about terrorism, there was also a legitimate guerilla movement there, and the Sandinistas were not a wholly democratically elected government.
So long as the operatives are working as agents of the state, and not as a discrete third-party group, it’s not terrorism.
Good guys or bad, it wasn’t negotiation with terrorists as the phrase is normally invoked, where it refers to concessions made to end a threat or resolve a pressing situation, such as releasing prisoners in exchange for hostages.
Hamas isn’t all about terrorism, either–indeed, to my knowledge, they spend a lot more time on social welfare programs than the Contras ever did. The contras absolutely engaged in terrorist actions. And while the Sandanista elections were not “wholly democratic,” they were better than the elections held in much of the rest of Central America at the time, and were almost certainly the most fair elections ever held in the nation’s history (and absolutely the fairest elections held in the country in several generations).
There were legitimate grievances against the Sandanista regime, no doubt, and there were legitimate ways to air those grievances. The Contras, which was led by holdovers from the Somoza dictatorship, were the wrong people to air those grievances, and the targeted rape, torture, and killings of hundreds of civilians was the wrong way to air those grievances.
By any reasonable measure the Contras were terrorists.
You’re confusing two unrelated issues. If your post had been “the United States has given material support to bad guys” I’d have never said a word. But your characterization of them as terrorists is either wrong or misses the point. Iran is not a “terrorist group” it’s a State, period. Materials and cash are fungible goods, so us giving stuff to Iran at some point is no more us supporting terrorism than it is when France or Germany or Russia engage in economic activity with Iran. Most revenue generated by the government of Iran, and most military hardware they receive goes to state purposes and not to support of terrorism.
I don’t have a real negative or positive opinion of the dealings we had with Iran to end the hostage crisis but it’s not the same as giving stuff to terrorist groups; words lose meaning when you use them too broadly, and that’s what would be going on if you labeled the entire State of Iran “terrorist.”
As for the Contras, I said they could certainly be considered terrorists. But your whole point was, as evidence that we do negotiate with terrorists the fact that we negotiated with Iran and gave stuff to the Contras. Well, we did negotiate with Iran (a State actor, not a terrorist group) and we did give aid to the Contras (Latin American guerrillas who many would consider to be terrorists) but not in response to any sort of hostage taking or negotiations. They weren’t doing anything negative to us and we didn’t support them to get them to back off, we supported them for Cold War geopolitical reasons (ill advised or not, beside the point.) So aside from using the term terrorist incorrectly in reference to an entire State, and aside from totally being wrong when bringing up the Contras to prove that we do negotiate with terrorists your two points are spot on! Keep up the good work.
With Iran we were negotiating, through intermediary powers and in mediation, with official representatives of the Iranian state. It was ultimately the President of Iran, the Ayatollah, and the Iranian Congress that approved the deal. We were not dealing with some random group, we were dealing with a State actor.
The dealings had nothing to do with terrorism. Iran had a lot of beefs against the United States, at that point at least some of them were genuine (the Shah was a legitimately bad actor and we kept him in power.) The first big issue was they wanted the Shah back, which was never going to happen. Luckily he was terminally ill so eventually he faded from the discussion. After that, Iran wanted a list of things including an apology for wrongs against Iran, and large amounts of money that Iran asserted American businesses owed either the Iranian government or Iranian businesses due to ongoing business dealings that went sour during the revolution. I don’t remember it all now but there was like a four part demand list and ultimately we agreed with three (we refused the apology demand), and one of the three was a large cash transfer (actually a large transfer of gold bars IIRC) for an amount less than what the Iranians wanted but IIRC more than what we thought we owed (the Iranians started off claiming we owed them $50bn+ or something.)
We promised to get arms to Iran if they would arrange for the release of hostages in Lebanon and get cash to the Contras. Cash to the Contras was against the law. A deal was made. Whichever Iran sponsored group in Lebanon were the operative terrorists, and whichever Contras were the death squad members is irrelevant. Among these terrorists, we set some up to exist (Contras), funded them (Contras), gave them weapons (Contras and Lebanonese terrorists) and made arrangements with their leaders (Iran and Contras) makes our broad pronouncements on terrorism full of shit. That some people now want to selectively define terrorism on some days and in some discussions only to exclude these acts (or others when they are shown as counter-examples) isn’t persuasive. It is akin to a pimp arguing he isn’t responsible for any prostitution, and moreover, doesn’t negotiate with prostitutes because beating money out of them doesn’t constitute negotiating.
If the US wants to get out of the terrorism business, we need to stop financing and arming them after arranging terms. That is negotiating. Firing a Hellfire missile up their asses from a drone might result in homicidal mistakes, but it isn’t terrorism. As much as I dislike wanton use of drones, it is preferable to death squads.
I don’t really know what you’re talking about on the Lebanon issue, you’d need to provide some cites there.
As for the Contras, you need to just stop talking about them. Your argument there has nowhere to go. This is a thread about “Why doesn’t the US Negotiate with terrorists” you’re making the assertion that we do as a matter of course. As evidence you’ve got the Iran thing, which you’ll need to expand on but most likely it’s going to come down to State to State dealings. With the Contras, we were never “negotiating” with them. That’s like claiming us supporting the Free French during WWII was “negotiating” with terrorists. For one, we never “negotiated” with them anymore than we negotiated with the Contras, we supported them. For two, it’s not as clear cut that the FF or the Contras are/were terrorists. Both killed innocent people, and did terrible things for causes the U.S. supported.
If you want to talk about bad things the U.S. has done, that’s got nothing to do with this thread. Supporting bad groups isn’t the same as negotiating with terrorists. Negotiating with terrorist implies terrorists are making some form of demand or are doing something we dislike, and we enter negotiations to try and end the crisis. That’s absent from the situation with the Contras.
Namely what I’m looking for on Iran is any evidence we transferred arms to Hezbollah. We transferred arms to the Iranians in a convoluted situation with a combination of national policy and illegal personal motivations but it was dealings with the government of Iran. There was no direct dealing with terrorist groups–and saying a State isn’t the same as a terrorist group is not “quibbling over definitions” it’s a key difference. “State Sponsor of Terrorism” is a meaningless term anyway, but even if it was not, it would not make such a state synonymous with “terrorist group.” The reason your claim that terrorist groups benefited from those arms transfers is just unbelievable to me is this happened during the Iran-Iraq War when Iran was absolutely desperate for weapons. The last thing in the world they’d do is take expensive relatively modern weapons from the United States they desperately needed in their war against Iraq and let a bunch of minor operatives in Lebanon have them.
It should be noted that during the Iran-Contra scandal, Iran was fighting for it’s life to survive against the Iraqi invasion so it had far more motivation to use the weapons to defend themselves rather to give it to their Hezbollah henchmen.
During the crisis, I remember the concern wasn’t as to whether Iran gave some of those weapons to Hezbollah, but whether or not the weapons were being used against America’s ally, Iraq.
No, I didn’t misspell Israel.
Anyway, it was yet another example of Iran playing the Americans like a guitar.
Bitches, please.
Here’s a link for those who don’t know or are conveniently forgetting the Iran Contra scandal, aka “arms for hostages” like it was a some anti-2nd amendment gun buy back. The Iran Contra affair was probably the most corrupting scandal in US history. A clusterfuck of immorality and shitty dealings. You might want to read up on it. Makes Watergate look like a bunch of mostly harmless fraternity pranks by comparison. St Ronnie indeed.
During this time of “realpolitik” the US alternately supported Iran, Iraq and the Contras. All of whom were murderous bastards.
No, you’re not, you are looking for a way to minimize, excuse and define it out of existence. Your dissembling on the subject and what Iran was doing for Hezbollah. My condemnation of your water carrying for Hezbollah and Iran and the Reagan Administration on this whitewash exceeds what I can write at the SDMB without violating the Pit rules, much less GD. I, for one, disapprove of fellow traveling with terrorists.
Okay, for starters when you have to link to Wikipedia, that’s usually a sign you don’t know that much about the scandal.
Secondly, Iran was vastly more in need of arms to stop the better equipped Iraqi army from conquering them than they were of getting arms to their Hezbollah flunkies, who at that point, were well positioned and not being invaded or attacked by the Jews.*
There’s a tendency to think everything in the Middle East revolves around Israel or America, but it doesn’t.
*. I said “Jews” because that’s how they would have described their enemy unless western reporters were nearby, not because I think that’s how the Israelis should be described.
“Arms for hostages” or not, the exchange was with Iran. Iran is a state. You can condemn the action without needing to call it “negotiation with terrorists”, because it wasn’t that. It was negotiation with a state actor.
That’s where you’re misreading Martin Hyde, it seems, it’s not about “whitewashing”, it’s about factual accuracy. We could condemn Neville Chamberlain by referring to the Munich Agreement as “negotiating with terrorists”, but it’s simply wrong.
The big myth was the whole Iran arms deal “started” as negotiations with a “moderate faction” within Iran, that would be receptive to normalizing relations with the United States once the Ayatollah died (he was in his 80s at the time.) This was mostly untrue, or if it ever was true it was dismissed early on as we started dealing directly with the Iranian military.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tehran/axis/map.html
It is screaming nonsense to attempt to define away Iran as a state terrorist and sponsor of terrorism. The US has been referring to states as terrorist states for years. Correctly, I might add.
What’s terrorism, then? The U.S. federal government alone uses at least six different ones.