Fast and Furious, Rick Perry's chutzpah, and the politics of executive privilege

Governor Rick Perry today compared Barack Obama to Richard Nixon for using executive privilege to conceal documents in Congress' "Fast and Furious" investigation, which takes a lot of chutzpah considering Perry's record on transparency.

Said Perry to CBS' Bob Scheiffer, "If this President over the past three and a half years had made any effort to secure the border instead of running operations like Fast and Furious ..." then he trailed off into his Nixon comparison without finishing the thought. It's a bizarre framing of the issue since the Obama Administration has beefed up border security (a buildup, incidentally, that this blog has criticized) more than any time since Woodrow Wilson sent the Army there in 1916.

Grits must admit, I'm befuddled at how ineptly the Obama Administration has handled the "Fast and Furious" investigation by Congress. In politics, it's often not the act itself that gets you in trouble but the coverup. The politically smart thing to do would have been to release everything, continuously point out the bungled undercover operation was planned and launched during the Bush Administration, fire an ATF administrator or three, and put the issue as quickly as possible in the rearview mirror. The most logical reason for NOT doing that is in fact the one cited by Attorney General Eric Holder and dismissed out of hand by his partisan critics - the possibility of revealing undercover agents and sources. (Ironically, President Bush used executive privilege in order to cover up the outing of an undercover agent, while Obama is now being criticized for using it to keep operatives from being outed.)

To be clear, there's no doubt that Fast and Furious was one of the most screwed up undercover operations ever, with the ATF targeting cartel operatives who were also paid FBI informants. And it was a bipartisan screwup, spanning administrations. Once hundreds of deaths, including a US Border Patrol agent, were linked to guns lost in the operation, the boondoggle reached epic proportions.

But there's more than a little irony when folks like Rick Perry who pound on "border security" themes make such attacks. Mules caught smuggling drugs north or guns south are the lowest folks on the cartel totem pole, and arresting them barely makes a dent in the problem: For every mule arrested at a border checkpoint two more crop up to take their place. So if you want to go after the big fish - actual cartel leaders - the only way to do it is through long-term, large-scale undercover operations like Fast and Furious. And such operations must offer the cartels something to justify the risk: Guns, shipment protection, money laundering services, or what have you. Otherwise, why would they let an undercover operative near them?

A small portion of the public favors full-on drug legalization (for marijuana, now a majority). But if one believes the drug war should be prosecuted - if you believe the US government should be targeting drug cartels through law enforcement - I don't see any other way but long-term undercover ops like Fast and Furious. Inevitably, some of those will fail, just like the military has often failed to stop violence in Afghanistan despite their best efforts. But should they not try? Would it have been better if they'd remained paralyzed by fear of failure? And importantly, does anyone believe that without Fast and Furious, Mexican drug cartels would have been unable to buy guns and kill people with them? I certainly don't.

Ironically, Governor Perry and other Fast and Furious critics are adopting arguments normally bracketed to supporters of gun control. A common refrain from the NRA and gun-rights advocates - in the past including Governor Perry - is that guns don't kill people, people kill people. The same is true in the case of the Border Patrol agent and others killed using guns from Fast and Furious: The cartels are responsible for the people they kill, not the Obama Administration. Or, if Perry et. al. believe suppliers of guns are to blame, it's hard to understand why the same logic doesn't undermine their domestic stance on gun rights. Perhaps discomfort with that strange repositioning is behind the almost bizarre accusations by some conservatives that Fast and Furious was intended (by the administration and a shadowy cabal of gun control advocates) to fail, blow back, and thereby give Americans cause to enact stronger gun-control laws. That nutty idea is spreading in large part because there's been no real information released to counter it.

I for one hope for a quick about-face from the Obama Administration. Release as much information as possible to the general public without putting undercover operatives at risk, and release everything else under the usual confidentiality requirements for Congressional oversight of national security. Then, like gawkers slowing down on the highway to look at a car crash, we can all see the mess for ourselves and move on to our day jobs.