Casablanca III

The Nation has David Corn's piece on the Bushies new appointee to be our first post-Saddam Iraqi Ambassador: John Negroponte.

When Bush selected Negroponte to be his UN representative in 2001, Negroponte was one of several Iran/contra figures being resurrected by the Bush crowd. As Honduras ambassador in the early 1980s, Negroponte, a career diplomat, participated in a secret and possibly illegal quid pro quo in which the Reagan Administration bribed the Honduran government with economic and military assistance to support the contras fighting the socialist Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Perhaps more significant, while Negroponte served in Honduras, he denied or downplayed serious human rights abuses by government security forces.

Negroponte didn't have to deal with the Honduran question when appointed UN ambassador: he was confirmed by the senate shortly after 9/11. And much as it grates internationalists to see Reagan's Iran-Contra friends employed as anything other than middle school history teachers in Akron, there probably won't be much controversy this time around.

These days Negroponte's tenure in Honduras is old news. The Washington Post's front-page story on his nomination did not mention his stint there. Senate staffers say that his record in Honduras won't be a focus of the confirmation hearings.

Corn is outraged; he points out that Negroponte misled the State Department, congress and pretty much everyone by denying that CIA-trained Hounduran army units were committing human rights abuses left and right. But with Rove and the Plume affair, Cheney's various conflict-of-interest schemes, the Iraqi intelligence debacle and the 9/11 commission, the Bushies could be thinking that one more criminal in high places won't make much difference. Of course, that's a pretty cynical thing for me to say, isn't it?

Now: In The Tailor of Panama, said tailor remarks that Panama is "Casablanca without heroes." If Iraq were to resemble that type of corrupt, lawless nation similar to so many central American democracy-in-name-only states, we'd be ahead of the game. It would certainly be better than Vietnam or Iran. And John Negroponte is quite experienced with the sort of nations Graham Greene used to write about. If he can help turn Iraq into that, I'm not too upset at giving another felon a government job.

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