Word: nicaragua
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...that the Russian force, 2,600 to 2,800 strong, was on duty in Cuba. Years ago U.S. intelligence began to pick up references to the Soviet force as a brigade, but officials who received that information attached little importance to it. Last spring, worried about Cuban influence in Nicaragua and the Caribbean, Zbigniew Brzezinski's National Security Council asked U.S. intelligence agencies to re-evaluate the Soviet role in Cuba. As late as mid-July, Defense Secretary Harold Brown assured Senator Frank Church of the Foreign Relations Committee that this Soviet role had not changed. In August, however...
...been a bad year for right-wing dictatorships-and for the U.S., which has often supported them. First Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, then General Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua were swept into exile by largely home-grown revolutions. Each had long been taken for granted as the absolute ruler of his country and as a friend of the U.S. Yet in the end, Somoza's national guard, cloned from the U.S. Marine Corps, was as ineffective against the Sandinista guerrillas as the Shah's army and secret police-the best that petro-billions could buy-were...
...spectacles in Iran and Nicaragua did not fit the pattern that Americans have grown used to in watching the rise and fall of client dictators. Far from propping up the Shah and Somoza, as the U.S. had so often been accused of doing, the Carter Administration seemed to be helping topple them, or at least undermining them with criticism of their human rights abuses...
Henry Kissinger feels that the Administration's campaign of proselytizing for democracy in Iran and Nicaragua aggravated, even if it did not cause, the crises in those countries. Viewing what he regards as a dual debacle from the perspective of a once and possibly future Secretary of State, Kissinger told TIME: "I'm convinced that trying to bludgeon societies into behavior analogous to our own either will lead to a deadlock and American irrelevance, or it will lead to the collapse of existing authority without a substitute compatible with our values and, therefore, the emergence of a radical...
Carter Administration officials vehemently reject Kissinger's complaint that they overthrew Somoza. The Sandinistas did that themselves. All the U.S. did was to administer a diplomatic coup de grâce in order to end the civil war. To preserve the status quo in Iran or Nicaragua-i.e., keep the Shah or Somoza in power-would probably have required direct military intervention, with G.I.s fighting alongside the Shah's imperial troops and Somoza's national guard. Even then, the Islamic and Sandinista revolutions might well have triumphed, leaving American prestige and strategic interests far more badly...