CHRISTIANITY & CRISIS, Vol. 44, No. 7 (30 April 1984), 154-­‐160 Grenada as looking glass: Playing the “Russian game” in the Americas By Andrew Reding “LOOKING BACK on Grenada,” James Finn has suggested (C&C, April 2), is a useful
exercise. It is indeed—but not, as Finn would have it, so that those who criticized the
U.S. invasion of last October can now be led to confess their error. Rather because the
invasion was a revealing symbol of a fundamental misdirection in U.S. foreign policy—
how far it departs from our national ideals, how fundamentally it distorts the relationship
between elected leaders and the citizenry, how dangerous it is to this nation and the
world. Grenada is a problem not because U.S. actions there were unjustly criticized but
rather because the lessons of the event may be neglected or forgotten.
If that happens, it will not be for the first time. To understand Grenada it will be helpful
to look even further back, because the 1983 invasion is in many disturbing ways
reminiscent of this country’s conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. Both
actions were justified on grounds that appeared to be expressions of basic American
tenets. It was said that we were taking action to rescue peoples who were being
hopelessly brutalized by governments imposed upon them by outside forces—Spain in
the case of the Philippines, Cuba and the Soviet Union in the case of Grenada. In both
instances assurances were given at the outset that we were seeking no selfish gains for
ourselves, but only to extend to others the blessings of freedom and democracy. In both
cases, these assurances were false.
And here we come upon a more ominous parallel. In both cases, the American public and
the U.S. Congress were deliberately kept in the dark regarding the facts of the invasion,
and regarding conditions on the islands prior to invasion. Press freedoms were curtailed
at critical periods when the president (McKinley in the former case, Reagan in the latter)
sought to mislead the public so as to obtain its acquiescence in policies that betrayed our
most distinctive national values.
In response to the earlier betrayal, Mark Twain was moved to write a satirical essay, “To
the Person Sitting in Darkness,” in which he compared the application of two very
different foreign policy norms to the Philippine situation—one of them rooted in
traditional “American” values of self-determination, the other in “European” values of
imperial domination. Faced with this choice, he suggests, President McKinley was too
attracted to the material rewards of European-style realpolitik to do justice to our own
revolutionary principles:
For presently came the Philippine temptation. It was strong; it was too strong, and he
[McKinley] made that bad mistake: he played the European game…It was a pity; it was
a great pity, that error; that one grievous error, that irrevocable error. For it was the very
place and time to play the American game again. And at no cost. Rich winnings to be
gathered in; rich and permanent; indestructible; a fortune transmissable forever to the
children of the flag. Not land, not money, not dominion—no, something worth many
times more than that dross: our share, the spectacle of a nation of long harassed and
persecuted slaves set free through our influence; our posterity’s share, the golden
memory of that fair deed. The game was in our hands.
With the sinking of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, the United States had a unique
opportunity to assist the spread of the principles of 1776. A Filipino republic was
proclaimed, a congress elected, and the Spanish were forcibly removed from the entire
archipelago except Manila by Filipino armies under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo.
At this point Filipinos held the warmest feelings for the Americans who, they believed,
had come to assist them in their independence struggles.
They were sadly mistaken. For unlike the French forces that helped us secure our
independence, the American armies turned on their Filipino allies as soon as the Spanish
had been vanquished. With the American public deliberately kept in the dark about the
already established independent and democratic government in the Philippines, the
decision was made to seize the archipelago for its geopolitical and economic advantages.
The U.S. Army was ordered to invade the islands and crush the infant republic.
Of course they [the Filipinos] wore surprised—that was natural; surprised and
disappointed; disappointed and grieved. To them it looked un-American;
uncharacteristic; foreign to our established traditions. And this was natural, too; for we
were only playing the American game in public—in private it was the European.
Brezhnev in the Americas Twain’s concluding words may have a familiar ring for correspondents covering the
White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon during the U.S. invasion of
Grenada. For even as President Reagan described the invasion to the nation as a “rescue
mission” to evacuate American medical students and to free Grenadians from Cuban and
Soviet tyranny, administration sources were privately admitting that the real purpose was
to replace a Marxist government with one friendlier to our interests. It was further
admitted that the action had been contemplated for years, and awaited only a suitable
pretext for execution. Once again we’ve begun to play the American game in public
while playing our adversaries’ game in private. Only this time it was not the “European
game” of the Spanish and British empires, but rather that other “European game” of the
Russian socialist empire, known also as the “Brezhnev Doctrine.”
For this kind of enterprise, secrecy and disinformation are essential tools. Though
McKinley allowed American correspondents into the Philippines, he saw to it that their
dispatches were censored so that embarrassing material could not get through. Reagan
achieved the same purpose by barring newsmen from Grenada during the invasion. In
both cases the news media were supplied with government-managed “news” carefully
tailored to fit the president’s pronouncements, so that in the crucial periods all that
reached the American public was a combination of falsehoods and misrepresentations—
backed, if at all, by selective documentation and manufactured statistics. In each of these
episodes, much of the truth emerged, but only in bits and pieces, and only after the
conquest was a fait accompli and had been accepted by most of the public as the glorious
achievement the administration proclaimed it to be.
This reliance on disinformation is not a minor aspect of the Grenada episode but rather a
principal reason why we should look at the event in very close detail, beginning with the
stance taken by the U.S. toward the People’s Revolutionary Government set up in
Grenada by Maurice Bishop following the overthrow of Sir Eric Gairy.
In terms of civil and political rights, Bishop’s PRG was hardly modeled on our own
democracy, but it would be difficult to conceive a more fitting description of its origins
than the rationale Thomas Jefferson provided for the American Revolution: “[W]hen a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a
design to reduce [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to
throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.” For
Prime Minister Gairy had transformed a nominal parliamentary democracy into a brutal
dictatorship; he organized a secret police, rigged elections, seized opponents’ properties,
squandered public funds, and imprisoned, tortured, and murdered political adversaries.
Yet under the Carter administration our government was friendly to the regime of terror
and hostile to the popular revolution that brought it down in March of 1979.
Characteristically, the hostility was expressed in the language of the “American game”: It
was charged that Bishop’s government was violating human rights. What had been
tolerable in extreme form under a right-wing dictatorship became intolerable in a milder
form under a socialist government. Gairy could get away with controlling the media,
bullying the churches, denying free elections, and imprisoning political adversaries;
Bishop could not. It made no difference that Bishop did not use torture, order killings, or
seize the land and property of adversaries, as Gairy had done; what mattered most was
that radical elements had overthrown an “elected parliamentary democracy” by force of
arms. (It is ironic that armed revolution should earn automatic condemnation in a city
named after a rebel general, where tourists pay homage at a memorial to the author of one
of history’s greatest revolutionary manifestos.) With Gairy threatening a countercoup,
Bishop asked the U.S. for defensive arms and economic aid. The Carter administration
coupled its refusal with a warning to Bishop not to turn to Cuba. When Grenada then
asked and got help from Castro, the U.S. used that fact as a sufficient reason for
continuing hostility.
Under Reagan, hostility became malevolence. Bishop’s efforts to seek accommodation—
first by a letter to Reagan promising elections, then during a visit to Washington—
brought no improvement. Bishop’s brand of socialism was focused on infrastructure (the
airport, roads, public housing) and public services (health care, schools). It allowed room
for the private sector; according to the International Monetary Fund, private investment
increased 130 percent in the first year after Bishop’s New Jewel Movement (NJM) took
power. Yet the administration not only refused bilateral aid but fiercely opposed all
proposals for multilateral assistance and took steps to discourage tourist visits to
Grenada. It was ideologically motivated economic warfare. One of its effects was to
nurture the Cuban connection. Another was to strengthen the hardline faction within the
NJM that regarded Bishop as a compromiser. Veiled and not-so-veiled threats of U.S.
military action further reinforced the hardliners’ resolve (International Policy Report,
January 1984).
Irrational rationale Bypassing for the moment the intervening steps, it is appropriate to examine the Reagan
administration’s publicly stated reasons for claiming that the invasion was legal and
necessary. Two reasons were declared at the outset. First, it was said that the military
landing was undertaken to evacuate endangered U.S. citizens. But no such endangerment
was ever demonstrated until alter the invasion had begun. In fact, prior to the invasion the
Grenadian military council had given assurances regarding the safety of all foreigners,
and had offered to assist in evacuating anyone who wished to leave. The Reagan
administration responded that the military council could not be trusted. In particular, it
was charged that the council had kept the airport closed. This claim is contradicted by
Canadians and by a former U.S. official (the director of President Reagan’s Social
Security Commission) who flew out of the airport at this time (New York Times, Oct. 29,
1983). As it turns out, it was the airports of U.S. allies in the region that were deliberately
closed to flights from Grenada, hampering evacuation prospects. Thus, the case for
military action to evacuate U.S. citizens was weak until the landing itself endangered
U.S. medical students at one of their two campuses. In any event, even if it could be
shown that a military rescue of U.S. citizens was imperative, international law does not
sanction such extreme measures as invasion of a country and overthrow of its
government for such a purpose.
As another supposed legal justification, President Reagan told the public that the U.S. had
been requested to participate in a regional military action by the Organization of Eastern
Caribbean States (OECS). The OECS is the product of a 1971 pact among seven small
island nations (Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Dominica, Antigua, St.Kitts-Nevis, and
Montserrat) that sought mutual security against external intervention. Article 8 of the
OECS Charter provides for their common defense in cases of “external aggression,”
contingent upon the unanimous vote of the member countries. The violation of those
provisions has been flagrant. Only four of the seven members voted to request U.S.
intervention. (The other two Caribbean countries joining in the request, Barbados and
Jamaica, were not OECS members.) It was later claimed that Grenada itself had formally
requested the invasion through Governor General Paul Scoon. But in the British
Commonwealth system the governor general of a country is merely the queen’s
ceremonial representative, no more entitled to make major political decisions for the
country than the queen is for Great Britain. Further difficulties rise if one recalls that
Maurice Bishop was the Grenadian signatory to the agreement that created the OECS.
There is no conceivable way he would have consented to a treaty that would enable a
governor general appointed on the recommendation of the dictator he overthrew (Eric
Gairy) to invite the foreign power most hostile to his government (the U.S.) to invade
under cover of a safeguard against “external aggression.” The ironies run deep in the
newspeak logic of the Reagan administration.
What then of the “external aggression” prerequisite for invoking Article 8? No one has
yet demonstrated the existence of any such aggression apart from the U.S. invasion itself.
Confronted with this reality, St. Lucia Prime Minister John Compton (who had asked for
foreign intervention to crush the Grenadian Revolution in 1979) termed the invasion a
“preemptive defensive,” justified by the need to prevent imminent attack from Grenada.
From a legal viewpoint, the treaty’s provisions relating to external aggression can only
mean aggression from outside the seven-country association, since each member country
was reserved the veto power. Militarily, no one has been able seriously to suggest that
Grenada, without any air, naval, or amphibious forces, posed any imminent threat to its
neighbors. To do so could only invite ridicule.
It must have been clear to the administration that those verifiable facts would turn out to
be highly embarrassing. Then, too, there was the spectacle of one of the world’s most
powerful countries invading one of the smallest with a large naval task force and more
than 6,000 of its most elite troops; Brobdingnag stepping on Lilliput. How then to rescue
the legal argument and secure public approval for the absurd? The only way was to play
the Russian game further: to supply the public with untruths and hyperbolize half-truths
in large quantities, and then to deny the possibility of verification to an over-inquisitive
free press.
Fragile facts Reagan himself took the lead. Announcing that “we got there just in time,” he said on
national television that Grenada had already become a “Soviet-Cuban colony being
readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy.” In
support of this conclusion he revealed that the invading troops had discovered three
warehouses full of arms and munitions, including one with “weapons and ammunition
stacked almost to the ceiling, enough to supply thousands of terrorists.” He also asserted
that the number of Cubans on the island was far more than anticipated, and that they had
turned out to be “a military force” rather than the airport construction workers they
pretended to be. He suggested that the Cubans and Russians had instigated the
assassination of Prime Minister Bishop and declared that “a Cuban occupation of the
island had been planned.”
These charges were dutifully reinforced by Admiral Wesley McDonald in a subsequent
press conference. He declared that captured documents showed there were at least 1,100
“well-trained professional [Cuban] soldiers” on Grenada, who had been “impersonating
construction workers.” Other captured documents were said to show that “341 more
officers and 4,000 more reservists” were soon to arrive in preparation for “the Cubans to
come in and take over the island, which they had already started to do at that time.”
These spectacular claims conveniently fill in the gaping holes in the administration’s
legal argument. Were they true, Cuba would be the “external aggressor” required by
Article 8 of the OECS Charter for the initiation of collective security measures.
Furthermore, Cuban and Soviet complicity in Bishop’s overthrow and assassination
would have constituted unlawful interference in the domestic affairs of Grenada under the
charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and would have
validated the governor general’s appeal to the OECS as the only legitimate authority still
able to make the appeal.
But not one of the administration’s charges has been substantiated. On the contrary,
almost all have been conclusively disproved. Although the Soviet Union promptly
recognized the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) that executed Maurice Bishop,
Cuba denounced the council well before the U.S. invasion, stating that “no doctrine,
principle, or proclaimed revolutionary position, and no internal split justifies such brutal
procedures as the physical elimination of Bishop” (Newsweek, Oct. 31, 1983). Castro’s
credibility in this matter is enhanced by the fact that he and Bishop were personal friends,
while his relationships with Bishop’s successors were anything but cordial. In a speech he
made in Havana on November 14, Castro praised Bishop as an exceptional revolutionary
leader in whom he had the highest trust, but said that “the [Bernard] Coard group never
had such relations, or such intimacy, or such confidence.” He said relations between
Cuba and the Revolutionary Military Council “were cold and tense,” and that “there did
not exist the most minimal coordination between the Grenadian army and the Cuban
construction workers and collaborators” in the period preceding the invasion (New York
Times, Nov. 15, 1983).
As for the number of Cuban combat troops on the island, the State Department eventually
admitted that the Cuban estimate of 784 Cubans on the island was substantially correct,
and that only a little more than 100 of these were “combatants” (meaning they had
defended themselves by force of arms), carefully sidestepping the fact that even they
could not be represented as troops. It was quietly acknowledged that the Cubans had in
fact been the construction workers, doctors, nurses, and teachers that Havana had claimed
they were. Furthermore, of the more than 60 Cuban “combatants” the Pentagon claimed
to have killed and whose bodies were shipped to Cuba, only 28 were in fact Cuban. The
others had to be shipped right back to Grenada.
What then of the captured documents proving that 4,341 Cuban soldiers were to be sent
to Grenada? A senior Pentagon official later privately conceded that the document in
question concerned the training of 4,341 Grenadian reservists (New York Times, Nov. 6,
1984). What of the warehouses full of arms? On inspection, they turned out to be not so
full alter all, with only one of them being one-quarter full, and all of them containing
mainly small arms. According to George Louison, Bishop’s minister of agriculture, the
arms belonged to the Grenadian militia, and had been removed to that location from rural
caches under cover of the round-the-clock curfew imposed by the RMC after Bishop’s
execution (Newsday, Oct. 30, 1983). With the military government so unpopular, it dared
not trust the country’s own militia, and so disarmed it. As far as the remaining “captured
documents” are concerned, Fidel Castro pointed to a clause in the Soviet agreement on
shipment of arms to Grenada that prohibited their export to third countries. He also
accurately pointed out that the documents “contained nothing having to do with the idea
of military bases in Grenada.”
As difficult as it may be to admit, it has to be acknowledged that Fidel Castro has turned
out to be telling the truth all along about Cuban involvement in Grenada as our own
president has been deceiving us. Even more troubling is that this deception has been
going on for some time now. Months before the overthrow of Bishop, Ronald Reagan
made a televised address in which he displayed an aerial reconnaissance photograph of
the Point Salines international airport under construction in Grenada. Pointing to the
9,000-foot runway and the oil storage tanks, he asserted that these were unnecessary for
commercial flights, and could only mean that the airport was to become a Cuban-Soviet
airbase. Reagan failed to mention that the airport had been first proposed by the British
government in 1954, when Grenada was still a colony; that it had been designed by the
Canadians, underwritten by the British government, and built in part by a London firm;
that the runway length was required for landing the jumbo jets flown by Caribbean
airlines, and that no fewer than six neighboring islands have runways at least as long. As
for the oil storage tanks, they would have been underground and, ironically, out of sight,
had the airport been intended for military uses.
Our government has known all of this all along. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that
the Central Intelligence Agency is incapable of the most rudimentary investigation. So
why the sensationalized presentation on nationwide television half a year before the crisis
even got under way in Grenada?
Improving the scenario The answer is that the American public was being prepared for an invasion that had been
in the works since the early days of the Reagan presidency. Back in the summer of 1981,
the invasion was rehearsed as part of the Ocean Venture ’81 naval maneuvers. The
operation was code-named “Amber and the Amberdines” (Cuba’s code is “Red”), in
undisguised reference to Grenada and the Grenadines, and the target was further labeled
“our enemy in the Eastern Caribbean.” The scenario called for “Amber” to “seize
American hostages,” prompting invasion after “negotiations with the Amber government
break down.” This full dress rehearsal was carried out on Vieques Island off Puerto Rico,
an island of roughly Grenada’s dimensions and topography. Paratroopers were flown in
from the U.S. for a dawn drop at one airport, while marines made an amphibious landing
at the other. The scenario concluded with the rescue of the “hostages” and the seizure of
the island, with U.S. troops remaining on Amber “to install a regime favorable to the way
of life we espouse.”
Knowledge of these preparations helps answer some lingering questions about the actual
invasion. The pretext for intervention had all along been the seizure of American
“hostages,” necessitating a “rescue mission.” So when the Revolutionary Military
Council failed to play its role in the script, the U.S. and its Caribbean “allies” turned
down the RMC’s evacuation offers, and closed airports on neighboring islands so as to
block independent evacuation efforts (Newsday, Oct. 27, 1983). The stage was then just
about set for the requisite “rescue mission.” All that remained was to produce a credible
threat to U.S. citizens—which brings us to the curious incident of the forgotten campus.
What is curious about it is that although the rescue of the medical students was one of the
two announced central objectives of the invasion, U.S. military forces said they had not
been informed that the school had two campuses on the island. The invaders therefore
secured only one campus in the initial stages; the second campus was then encircled by
enemy troops and could only be secured after 36 hours of heavy fighting. How could this
happen? The island had been under surveillance for years; the invasion had been not only
contemplated but planned and rehearsed. U. S. officials were in continuous contact with
the school’s administrators in the days before the invasion; two officials from the U.S.
embassy in Barbados had been permitted to visit the school at the time (New York Times,
Oct. 23, 1983). To try to believe that the existence of the second campus was unknown
asks too much of the most credulous. In the circumstances, it is not irrelevant to point out
that the RMC, conscious of the “Amber and the Amberdines” scenario, was doing all it
could to avoid giving provocation; the last thing it wanted was to lend substance to any
claim of a need for a rescue operation. But once the invasion was under way, with one
campus secured and the other left exposed, the Grenadian military had nothing to lose by
rising to the bait, thus setting the stage for a dramatic mission of liberation.
The drama was an instant hit in the U.S. With independent reporters barred from the
action, administration propaganda dominated the news. Americans were bombarded with
shocking tales of an attempted Cuban-Soviet takeover of the island, of secret bases for
the export of terrorism, of a Cuban army taking to the hills, of American medical students
under fire, and of a heroic rescue by our marines and rangers. It was the “Russian game”
of managed news, and it was a big success, yielding Ronald Reagan a commanding lead
in the public opinion surveys.
But the drama did not play so well abroad. Many countries, large and small, East and
West, were on good terms with Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government
while Ronald Reagan was plotting its downfall. When Reagan mentioned the Cubans,
Russians, Libyans, and North Koreans on the island, he failed to mention the French, the
Venezuelans, the Canadians, the Italians, the British, etc., who were likewise working on
development projects. Because of their presence, foreign governments were sufficiently
well informed about Grenada from their own direct experience to see through the lies and
misrepresentations. In an interview on January 21, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher rebutted
every one of President Reagan’s supposed justifications for invasion. Stressing that her
information indicated that all foreign nationals, including the U.S. students, had been safe
before the invasion, she insisted that “if they were going to be in danger, the time of
maximum danger would be the time when anyone else set foot on the island. ” She added
that the Cuban-built airport was essentially no different from and no more threatening
than similar airports on neighboring islands. And she pointed out that the OECS meeting
requesting intervention had been followed by a meeting of the Caribbean community
(Caricom) representing the wider Caribbean, which had counseled against the use of
force. Instead, Caricom responded to the military coup and the murder of Bishop by
imposing trade and diplomatic sanctions and by sending a list of demands to the RMC.
But Reagan ordered the invasion to proceed before the council had a chance to reply to
the Caricom initiative.
The administration also ignored other diplomatic opportunities, including a remarkable
overture by Fidel Castro. Several days before the invasion, Castro sent a message to the
U.S. government through the Swiss embassy in Havana:
…The United States knows our position [condemning the murder of Bishop and
takeover by the Revolutionary Military Council] in relation to the events in Grenada
and of our position not to involve ourselves in the internal affairs of that country. We
know that they are concerned for their numerous North American residents there, as we
are also concerned about the hundreds of Cuban cooperation personnel working there in
several fields, and about the news that U.S. naval forces are approaching Grenada.
According to reports we have, no U.S. citizen or other foreigner has had any problems,
nor have our personnel. It is important to maintain contact on this matter in order to
cooperate if any difficulty arises and so that measures may be taken for the security of
these persons without violence or intervention into the country (New York Times, Nov.
4, 1983).
It would be hard to imagine a more conciliatory message, and therein lies the problem.
By responding in kind, the Reagan administration would have been joining in civil
diplomacy with the government it refers to as the source of all aggression and terrorism
in the Americas, and would have thereby suggested the possibility of negotiations over
other issues, including the situations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. And that would
undermine its objective of—to use UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s words—rolling
back Marxism in the hemisphere.
Other available diplomatic options were similarly spurned. The administration could have
taken its case to the UN or the OAS. It could have approached the British Commonwealth
of Nations, of which Grenada was a member. It could have immensely strengthened
Caricom’s hand by supporting or joining in its forceful diplomacy rather than ignoring it.
But the administration renounced diplomacy altogether in favor of overwhelming military
force. Prime Minister Thatcher gave expression to the norms violated by this choice:
“[Y]ou do not, in my strong feeling, use force” against another country without “an
overwhelming case” and before “everything else” has been tried. By failing to satisfy
these preconditions, President Reagan placed in jeopardy “the reputation that we, the free
world, do not pursue our objectives by force, whereas we have always said that the
difference was that the Soviets did.”
Flouting the law Granting that the record of the “free world” (including Great Britain and the U.S.) is
hardly as spotless as Thatcher implies, it is true that our government’s action toward
Grenada constitutes a clear application of the Brezhnev Doctrine and a repudiation of our
own professed standards. It was as barefaced a violation of the law of nations—and
specifically of the UN and OAS charters— as the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and
Afghanistan. Article 2, Section 4, of the UN charter mandates that “all members shall
refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial
integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with
the Purposes of the United Nations. ” Among the purposes enumerated in Article I is the
“develop[ment of] friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of
equal rights and self-determination of peoples.”
This language leaves so little room for ambiguity in interpreting the legality of the U.S.
action in Grenada that the U.S. lost the support of even its closest allies in the United
Nations. The Security Council voted 1l-l on a motion condemning the invasion, with
France and the Netherlands in the affirmative, Britain abstaining, and the U.S. casting its
veto. The disapproval was equally overwhelming in the General Assembly, where only El
Salvador, Israel, and several Caribbean countries supported the U.S. position. Not a
single member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization voted with the U.S.: Even such
anticommunist allies as the Philippines and Thailand acknowledged that the U.S. action
was “a flagrant violation of international law” (New York Times, Nov. 4, 1983).
The language of the OAS Charter is even less favorable to the Reagan administration’s
position. According to Article 15, “no state or group of states has the right to intervene,
directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any
other state.” Article 17 then adds that “the territory of a state is inviolable; it may not be
the object, even temporarily, of military occupation or other measures of force taken by
another state, directly or indirectly, on any grounds whatever” (italics added). In this
connection it is relevant to recall that by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, treaties
ratified by the Senate become “the supreme Law of the Land.” The UN and OAS
Charters are such ratified treaties; the OECS Charter, to which the U.S. was never even
associated, is not. To disregard elements of international law that our own government
has formally pledged to observe in favor of a pretended observation of treaties to which
we are not even a party is not only to dishonor our country before the world, but to
violate our own highest law.
But it is not only our law that is being thus trampled upon: It is also the ethical vision
behind the law, that striving toward a more just and moral order that is still our most
distinctive and valuable tradition, however often it has been dishonored. Lest we forget,
the UN and OAS were largely U.S. creations, aiming in no small measure to project
American democratic values to the hemisphere and to the world at large. That this is so
can be readily seen by comparing the texts of their charters with those of our Declaration
of Independence and Constitution. Guided by the vision of Franklin Roosevelt and
Cordell Hull, the United Nations was established for the purpose of reducing recourse to
war while promoting the decolonization of European empires and the rise to selfdetermination of their peoples. In this last respect it was a fitting embodiment of our
Declaration of Independence’s affirmation of “the separate and equal station to which the
laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them. ”
In further reaffirmation of our founding principles, Roosevelt proclaimed the “Good
Neighbor Policy,” and Secretary of State Hull accordingly renounced any right to
intervention by the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere. The “Good Neighbor” principles
were soon formalized in the OAS Charter, doing justice to our Declaration’s assertion
that “as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace,
contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and do all other Acts and Things which
Independent States may of right do.”
There can be no greater betrayal of this American tradition than Ronald Reagan’s
importation of the Brezhnev Doctrine into the Western Hemisphere. For like the Russian
leadership, the Reagan administration has insisted on exercising a veto over the economic
and political systems of its neighbors. The Good Neighbor Policy is dead. Grenada is the
bellwether for the new U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere. Nicaragua
appears to be next: Already the U.S, is trying to revive an alliance of Central American
right-wing dictatorships (CONDECA) for the purpose of replicating the OECS precedent
and justifying another U.S. invasion. Conciliatory actions by the Sandinistas are left
untested and their offers to negotiate rebuffed, just as Maurice Bishop’s overtures were
earlier spurned. Peace and mutual accommodation are no more a part of this
administration’s foreign policy than evacuation was in Grenada. Nor are democracy,
freedom, and self-determination, despite the heavy barrage of rhetoric about elections and
freedom of the press. The real aim is to reduce our neighbors to satellites. As in Twain’s
description of the Philippine tragedy, we have once again an American president who is
trumpeting the “American game” in public while shamelessly playing the “European
game” in private.
Examined from this perspective, Grenada has become as a looking glass: Whatever light
can be shed on it helps us better see ourselves. We are thereby enabled to perceive that
those who are most strident in their denunciations of the Soviet Union, singling it out as
the global “focus of evil, ” are also the most eager to adopt its ways; that the most
energetic flag-wavers and Bible-thumpers are often the first to betray both their national
heritage and the commandments of the Prince of Peace; that the loudest advocates of
“law and order” become its most flagrant violators when its observance would shield the
weak from the powerful. And that there is no way to adopt a Soviet-style foreign policy
without bringing it home as well. For when we violate international law we inevitably
violate constitutional law, and when we undermine the sovereignty of other peoples, we
just as inevitably end up eroding our own.
ANDREW REDING is founder and former president of Isles, Inc., a nonprofit
organization created to foster socially and ecologically responsible development in poor
communities in the U.S. and the third world, emphasizing the use of decentralized
technologies and local self-determination with the goal of community empowerment. He
became familiar with the people of Grenada and with the island’s politics and economy
through an Isles project called Atlas of Grenada which explored local human and natural
resources, among them the use of wind power. He is now a freelance writer and
consultant. An article by Reding on the Grenadian revolution has appeared in the
Christian Century (April 11); another, dealing with the future of U.S.-Grenadian
relations, will be published by the World Policy Journal.