Word: grenada
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Last night he criticized the Administration's involvement in Grenada, El Salvador and Nicaragua...
...what history is about to be repeated, but everyone is quick to raise the specter of the return of some dreaded "another." The critics see another Viet Nam here, another round of gunboat diplomacy (carried out by another Teddy Roosevelt) there. Administration officials are quoted as explaining that the Grenada invasion was meant variously to prevent "another Iran," "another Beirut"(!), "another Nicaragua" or "another Suriname." (There is irony here. Suriname had fallen under Cuban influence after a recent military takeover. The day after the Grenada invasion, Suriname expelled the Cuban ambassador and practically every Cuban adviser in the country...
...Grenada, now the metaphorical capital of the world, has been compared by one side or the other with all of these and more. The real Grenada is none of the above. The upheaval there was not, as it was in Iran, a xenophobic religious revolution that saw in every American an agent of Satan and a spy. Grenada was not, like Cuba or Nicaragua, a regional power that could project real force against its neighbors (though it would still be valuable to a great power as a staging point; in this respect it resembled, if anything, other useful dots...
Grenadian reality is far less exotic. It takes a citizen of the Caribbean, more in control of his historical imagination and more in command of the facts on the ground, to see Grenada for what it is. Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga, no Teddy Roosevelt he, contributed troops to the Grenadian invasion force. His concern was not that Grenada was recapitulating any past disaster; on the contrary, it was creating for the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean a wholly new one. Military juntas and large armies are alien to the region, he explained. The largest army in the Organization...
...players, the tactics, the goals and the intentions of American leaders. But we disdain mundane details like history, geography and strategy. Viet Nam is everywhere. Every exercise in what used to be called containment-55 advisers in El Salvador, for example-is now called "another Viet Nam." If the Grenada operation had lasted more than a week, one can be sure the dreaded memory would have been hauled out yet again. Che Guevara once promised two, three (American radicals added "many") Viet Nams. He went to Bolivia to get things started, but got himself killed instead. And yet our haunted...