Everybody's Doing It

The Reagan Administration is not the only government struggling to cope with the problem of clandestine and illegal weapons sales to Iran. From Portugal, France and Sweden have come revelations that several Western countries are heavily embroiled in a variety of such illicit dealings. In almost every case, the motivations behind the traffic have been commercial rather than political, and its discovery abroad has led to considerably less domestic tumult than in Washington. Quipped one U.S. official: "The real question is, Who isn't selling arms to Iran?"

The most comic episode of European arms smuggling to surface involves a 4,300-ton West...