Word: nicaragua
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Lawrence Wikander, a retired librarian of Williams College, fascinated an audience with comparisons between Reagan and Coolidge. Both had trouble with Nicaragua (Coolidge sent Marines to keep the peace in 1926 at the request of the Nicaraguan President); both were harder workers than is commonly believed; Reagan was an instant Eureka College campus leader while Coolidge bloomed late at Amherst. Even Amherst's crusty historian, Henry Steele Commager, an ardent fan of F.D.R.'s, had a kind word: "Coolidge's virtues were chiefly negative ones, but then, negative virtues are always preferable to positive vices...
...political controversy deepened over how the U.S. could best support the government in El Salvador and the rebels in Nicaragua, military professionals were concerned with a basic question: In either case, will the U.S.-backed forces win? The answer: there are grounds for optimism in El Salvador, and pessimism about the CIA-backed contras in Nicaragua...
...extreme right. Early in the Reagan Administration, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig struck just the wrong note with his tough talk about "going to the source." He meant Cuba. He seemed to be suggesting that if the U.S. could just clobber Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would behave, or better yet, go away. He also inadvertently aroused suspicion that he was blind to indigenous sources of turmoil, such as poverty and social injustice...
...military action that would be quick would not be, almost by definition, a true fix, and might well end up being the opposite. Sending in U.S. combat forces would surely wreak political havoc at home before it could prove decisive against the guerrillas in El Salvador. As for Nicaragua, a full-scale U.S.-supported invasion by the contras and the Honduran armed forces might drive the Sandinistas back into the countryside, but almost certainly the war would go on, and the U.S. would have little stomach...
...duck: What happens if the momentum of change in Latin America confronts the U.S. with a Mexico that has acquired a leadership, political system, foreign policy and degree of militarization roughly along the lines of what Castro has achieved in Cuba and what the Sandinistas have in mind for Nicaragua? One need not resort to the hackneyed image of falling dominoes to imagine that the sequential triumph of leftist revolutions and, perhaps more important, the establishment of leftist dictatorships around the waist of the Central American isthmus, could increase the chances of upheaval in Mexico, the largest and potentially most...