While the Iran-contra scandal has virtually monopolized the attention of the American media since last November, Europeans tend to wonder what the fuss is all about. To a great many of them, the scandal seems like yet another perplexing case of American moralism run wild, a national exercise in self- flagellation. Many Europeans, who also never fully understood why Americans became so upset by the Watergate affair in the mid-1970s, feel that such a crisis could never happen in their own countries. TIME's Paris bureau chief Jordan Bonfante examines the European bewilderment concerning Iranscam:
On the evening of Sept. 27, 1985,...
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