3w ago

ELI5 The Iran-Contra situation? Because it kind of seems dumb that a country who was holding US hostages for so long. Then the US thought hey lets give them money for guns?

All the while knowing they hate the US. Why them?

6 comments

Treason. The answer is high treason.
The very short version is
After the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the US placed an arms embargo on Iran so they legally couldn't sell arms to Iran
Reagan wanted to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, however Congress had prevented him from directly funding them so they had to find some way of doing that off the books.
So since Iran wanted to buy weapons, they sold them some weapons so they could turn around and use that money to fund the Contras and circumvent Congress.
They also tried to justify it because they were hoping Iran would influence Hezbollah to release hostages they had taken in Lebanon (which kind of worked, the hostages were released, but Hezbollah pretty much immediately took more hostages, so not really)
This glosses over a lot of details of course.
- Bonus detail that didn't amount to much: one of the plans to rescue the hostages involved developing a rocket assisted takeoff and landing system for a military cargo plane to get a team on the ground to extract the hostages and exfiltrate via said plane using a soccer stadium as an airstrip.
  Edit: jet and rocket could be used interchangeably but rocket is more accurate in this case.
Why would the US arm people who hate us?
Wait, which time?
My understanding, Extremely simplified:
Iran had US hostages.
"But we need guns".
US wanted to buy some goodwill
CIA wanted something untraceable cash
CIA sold guns to Iran for cash they could then funnel into backing the Contras
Iran accepted weapons, but took their bloody time releasing any hostages
The agreement had basically devolved into selling weapons for no apparent advantage (Unless you're in the CIA)
Media learns about the ordeal
Oliver North gets thrown under the bus as a scapegoat
Hostages are eventually released
fast forward a few decades, and Oliver North becomes yet another talking head for Fox News whenever something vaguely familiar to him is in the news cycle (Iran)
You don't know of the great patriot Ollie north?

6 comments