Invasions,

Catastrophic Success

excerpted from the book

Overthrow

America's Century of Regime Change from Haiti to Iraq

by Stephen Kinzer

Times Books, 2006, paper

Invasions

p219
In mid-October, a bizarre series of events on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, including the summary execution of the prime minister, raised the sudden possibility of American intervention there.

p220
... officials in Washington were sensing both danger and opportunity in the unfolding Grenada crisis. The island's pro-Cuban government, which the United States mightily disliked, had just been overthrown and its leaders shot. A new clique declared that the old regime was not militant enough, and vowed to impose pure Marxism-Leninism on this small island.

It seemed at least conceivable that the newly empowered radicals might try to capture or harm the American medical students, and this danger lent an air of urgency to the deliberations in Washington. Another factor also fired enthusiasm there. Reagan's advisers immediately realized that this crisis gave the United States an unexpected chance to win a strategic Cold War victory. Americans were hungry for one. Many felt frustrated after a decade of what they considered global humiliation, marked by defeat in Vietnam and the long, agonizing Iran hostage crisis. They voted for Reagan in 1980 because he promised to restore the "standing" of the United States. Grenada gave him his chance.

p221
Vice President Bush called to report that the Special Situation Group favored an operation that would not only secure American citizens but restore democratic rule and end Cuban influence. That meant a full-scale invasion and the overthrow of Grenada's government. Without hesitating or asking a question, Reagan agreed.

"If we've got to go there," he told Bush, "we might as well do all that needs to be done."

When Reagan retired that Saturday night in what had once been President Eisenhower's bedroom, he had every right to hope for a good night's sleep. He did not have it. At 2:27 in the morning, McFarlane came to his room to awaken him. With him he carried one of the most devastating reports Reagan would hear during his presidency. The United States Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut had been destroyed in a suicide-bomb attack, leaving hundreds dead. It was among the bloodiest attacks ever on an American military post, and one of the greatest tragedies in Marine Corps history.

... The bombing in Lebanon had inflicted another grievous blow on the United States. It intensified the desire of many Americans for some kind of revenge, some flash of vindication or redemption somewhere in the world, some chance to show their national power.

Reagan had already approved the idea of invading Grenada but had not issued any final orders. There was still time to pull back, to limit the operation to a simple evacuation of American citizens. The prime ministers of Guyana, Belize, and the Bahamas were urging this course. Aides asked Reagan whether the Beirut bombing had led him to reconsider his endorsement of the Grenada invasion. On the contrary, he replied, it steeled his will.

"If this was right yesterday," he said, "it's right today."

p223
Grenada had been a relatively quiet British colony for more than a century when, at the beginning of 1951, it was paralyzed by a general strike. The strike's chief organizer, Eric Gairy delighted audiences wit his biting attacks on the mulatto aristocracy, and when the British held an election for a home-rule government, he formed a political party and rode it lo victory. He dominated Grenada for most of the next quarter century ...

p224
In the 1970s a group of ... young visionaries met in St. George's, formed the New Jewel Movement, and began campaigning against Gairy. Several had recently returned from London, including the tall, bearded Maurice Bishop, a recent law school graduate ...

... the evident impossibility of democratic change and New Jewel's increasing radicalism-propelled Grenada into its next era. On March 11, 1979, Gairy flew to New York to discuss "cosmic phenomena" with United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Bishop and other New Jewel leaders believed, or claimed to believe, that he had left orders for the Mongoose Gang to kill them all. They decided to strike first.

... Their first proclamation, which Bishop read on the newly renamed Radio Free Grenada, promised that "all democratic freedoms, including freedom of elections, religion and political opinion, will be fully restored to the people."

p225
The small group of men and women who ran New Jewel-there were only forty-five party members at the time of the 1979 coup, and never more than eighty-were idealists. Once in power, they built roads, opened a new high school and several free clinics, developed agriculture and the fishing industry, and cut the unemployment rate. They also abolished Parliament and the constitution, muzzled the opposition press, and drew up a "watch list" of potential enemies to be kept under surveillance. The cornerstone of their ideology, as Bishop outlined it in a 1982 speech to party members, was their belief that they comprised a I Leninist "vanguard" entitled to rule by decree.

p226
New Jewel leaders proclaimed themselves part of an anti-Yankee 'alliance that included Castro's Cuba, the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and rebels throughout the region who were defying what Bishop called "the vicious beasts of imperialism." They sharply increased the size of Grenada's army and sent officers to Cuba for training. Several hundred Cuban construction workers, some of them trained as members of the militia, arrived to build an airport at Point Salines, a few miles south of St. George's, that would be big enough to accommodate jumbo jets full of tourists-or, as officials in Washington repeatedly pointed out, combat jets. New jewel leaders signed three military agreements with the Soviet Union that brought them millions of dollars' worth of weaponry at no charge. They struck up friendships with East Germany, Libya, North Korea, and almost every other country in the world that was hostile to the United States.

p230
... October 20, the Crisis Pre-Planning Group, whose job was to monitor world trouble spots, met at the Executive Office Building in Washington, across from the White House. Its chairman, Admiral John Poindexter, presented a variety of military options. Driven in part by the strong views of his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, and Constantine Menges, a former CIA officer and adviser to the National Security Council, the group decided to endorse a radical course: the invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of its government.

p237
About six thousand American soldiers ultimately landed in Grenada.

... eight days after the invasion, the American force had dwindled to three thousand. By the end of the year, only a few companies of military police remained.

... The United Nations General Assembly overwhelming passed a resolution "deeply deploring... a flagrant violation of international law."

President Reagan, as was his wont, brushed this criticism aside. When asked how he reacted to news that more than one hundred member states had voted for the United Nations resolution, he replied, "One hundred nations in the United Nations have not agreed with us on just about everything that's come before them where we're involved, and it didn't upset my breakfast at all." He knew he had given Americans a psychological as well as a strategic victory, and had reason to feel proud.

A few weeks later, Reagan gave an emotional speech to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in New York. Aides took pains to tell reporters that he had written it himself. In a few words, he distilled what he believed the Grenada invasion should teach Americans and the world.

"Our days of weakness are over!" Reagan proclaimed. "Our military forces are back on their feet, and standing tall."

You're No Good

p239
During the mid-1980s, senior American leaders, including President Ronald Reagan, vigorously supported military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador ...

... General Manuel Antonio Noriega, commander of the Panama Defense Forces, had good reason to believe himself above the law. Within Panama he ruled almost by whim. In the wider world, he had accumulated a remarkably diverse set of friends. He collaborated simultaneously with some of Colombia's most powerful drug dealers and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; with the Sandinista army in Nicaragua and guerrillas who were fighting to depose it; with the CIA and the Cuban intelligence service. Wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of an illegitimate child of the Panama City slums, amply supplied with all he needed to feed his considerable private appetites, and with powerful allies around the world, he came to consider himself invulnerable.

p240
In 1968, Panamanian military officers seized power in a bloodless coup. [Hugo] Spadafora joined an underground cell devoted to overthrowing their regime. He was soon arrested. In other Latin American countries he might have rotted in jail or been made to "disappear," but the new Panamanian strongman, General Omar Torrijos, was not a dictator in the classic mold. Although hardly a paragon of democratic virtue, he was a visionary determined to wrest power from the country's entrenched elite and pull the Panamanian masses out of poverty. Two weeks after Spadafora was arrested, Torrijos summoned him from his cell for a long conversation about revolution, social reform, and the challenges of power. When it was over, he made Spadafora an offer: instead of returning to prison, he could go to a remote spot in the Darien jungle and open a health clinic. Spadafora instantly accepted and plunged into his work with zealous passion. Later Torrijos named him director of medical services in Colon, the country's poorest province, and then promoted him to deputy minister of health. In the late 1970s, bored with the bureaucrat's life, Spadafora asked for and received Torrijos's permission to raise a guerrilla squad to fight alongside Sandinistas, who were rebelling against the dynastic Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.

... Torrijos was an idealist who scorned the ideologies of left and right, and looked everywhere for ideas that were practical enough to improve the lives of ordinary people. He was also a career soldier who had seized power in a coup, knew he had many enemies, and relied on amoral thugs like Noriega to protect his one-man rule. In 1970 he promoted Noriega to one of the most sensitive of all government posts, chief of G-2, the office of military intelligence Spadafora was everything Noriega was not: tall, fair-skinned, highly articulate, improbably handsome, and immensely self-confident. Over the years, as Noriega slipped steadily toward the criminality that would become his hallmark, Spadafora came to detest him.

p242
At his home in San José, Costa Rica, Spadafora rose early on September 13, 1985. He began his day with yoga exercises, then ate breakfast and set off in a taxi toward the Panamanian border. One of his friends had offered to meet him there and drive him to Panama City, but Spadafora decided to take a bus instead, fearing that if he traveled in a private car, Noriega's men might arrange to kill him in a staged crash. The bus made its first stop in Concepción, a dusty little town about ten miles inside of Panamanian territory. There an officer of the Panama Defense Forces stepped aboard, found Spadafora, and lifted his bag off the rack above his head.

... The next day, a Costa Rican farmer who lived near the Panamanian border was rounding up stray chickens when he saw two legs sticking up from a muddy pond. He waded out and found that a human body had been dumped into a sack marked as property of the United States Postal Service. When police arrived, they found that the body had no head. The next day it was identified as that of Hugo Spadafora. It bore clear evidence of torture he stomach was full of blood that Spadafora had swallowed as his head was being slowly cut off.

"They Executed Spadafora!" screamed the banner headline in the beleaguered opposition newspaper La Prensa. It carried a statement from the victim's father, a revered figure in his own right, that set the terms for the conflict that would build for the next four years before exploding into a world crisis.

"The macabre murder of Dr. Hugo Spadafora was planned and coldly executed by the chief of G-2, Colonel Julio Ow Young, carrying out the orders of the commander of the [Defense Forces], General Manuel A. Noriega," the statement said. "We have complete and authentic proof of these facts."

p244
By 1983 ... General Noriega, had emerged as commander of the National Guard-which he renamed the Panama Defense Forces and the country's strongman. The first figure to dispute his power was Hugo Spadafora, who paid for his brazen challenge with his life.

Noriega was at a dermatology clinic in Geneva when Spadafora was killed, undergoing treatment that he hoped would repair his deeply scarred face. There he received an urgent telephone call from Major Luis Córdoba, head of the unit that had captured Spadafora. Evidently neither man realized that American intelligence agents were eavesdropping.

"We have the rabid dog in our hands," Major Córdoba told his commander.

"And what does one do with a rabid dog?" Noriega asked in reply. That was the go-ahead soldiers needed in order to begin the long night of torture that ended in Spadafora's decapitation.

p243
Noriega had good reason to believe he could ride out this storm. He had accumulated an extraordinarily diverse and powerful group of friends. Among them were dictators, guerrilla fighters, drug smugglers, and a variety of high-ranking American officials.

The CIA first recruited Noriega as an informer when he was a young cadet at the Peruvian military academy. His salary increased as he rose through the military ranks, and by the time he became chief of military intelligence, it reached $110,000 annually. He was one of the agency's most important "assets" in Latin America, even meeting personally with CIA director George H. W. Bush during a visit to Washington in 1976.

In the early 1980s, Noriega formed a partnership with the drug cartel based in MedellIn, Colombia, allowing it free access to clandestine airstrips in Panama from which it shipped vast amounts of cocaine into the United States. For this service, the cartel paid him fees in the range of $100,000 per flight. Typically for Noriega, however, he was also working as a principal informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He gave it valuable information that led to the arrest of hundreds of traffickers from rival cartels, and to the seizure of tons of cocaine. Senior American officials sent him flattering letters of commendation.

During this period, Noriega further endeared himself to the Reagan administration by agreeing to help the Nicaraguan contras. While publicly mouthing platitudes about the need for peace and cooperation among Central American countries, he gave the contras invaluable covert support.

p247
Opinion in Washington slowly began to turn against Noriega. The director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Jack Lawn, began a quiet investigation of his role in the drug trade, and refused a request from one of Noriega's advocates, Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council staff, that he call it off. Then two United States senators from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Helms and John Kerry of Massachusetts, introduced an amendment to the 1986 Intelligence Authorization Act that required the CIA to investigate Noriega's involvement in drug trafficking, arms smuggling, money laundering, and the Spadafora murder.

p249
Two of Noriega's most powerful supporters in the Reagan administration, Elliott Abrams and Oliver North, fell from power as a result of their involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, a covert scheme to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to prop up the contras. Then, early in 1988, two grand juries in Florida handed up criminal indictments charging Noriega and more than a dozen others, including Pablo Escobar, the boss of the MedellIn cartel, with conspiring to send tons of cocaine into the United States.

These indictments were not the only reason the United States began turning against Noriega. He had embraced a peace plan for Central America-named after Contadora, the Panamanian island where regional leaders launched it-that the Reagan administration strongly opposed. Noriega's friends in Washington began looking for a way to ease him out of power.

p250
For many years Noriega seemed able to manipulate presidents of the United States almost as easily. Jimmy Carter cut off his CIA stipend but blocked efforts to indict him on drug and arms-smuggling charges. Ronald Reagan ignored his crimes in order to ensure his continued support for the contras. When George H. W. Bush, a former CIA director who was intimately aware of Noriega's activities, took office, in January 1989, Noriega had good reason to believe he had another friend in the White House.

Bush, however, came into office with the handicap of being considered weak and indecisive, and had to deal with what commentators called "the wimp factor." In May, after Noriega imposed his own president against the will of Panamanian voters, Bush announced that he was sending 1,800 troops to American bases in Panama, a step that was intended as a message to Noriega. When a reporter asked the president that he would like the Panamanians to do, Bush replied that they :should "just do everything they can to get Mr. Noriega out of there."

p254
General Powell presented the Blue Spoon plan. It was to be a massive invasion by 25,000 troops, about half of them from the Canal Zone and the other half from bases in the United States. They would strike twenty-seven objectives simultaneously, destroy the Panama Defense Forces, capture Noriega, and oversee a quick return to civilian rule. Bush asked if a smaller operation, targeted specifically against Noriega, might be feasible. Powell said it was not, because Noriega moved quickly and American commandos might not be able to find him.

p255
The Panama Defense Forces had 13,000 soldiers, but most of them were police officers, customs agents, or prison guards. Only about 3,500 were trained or armed for combat. They had no hope of resisting the overwhelming power that came down upon them in the predawn hours of December 20.

More than 3,000 Rangers parachuted onto and around airports, military bases, and other objectives in Panama, making this the largest combat airdrop since World War II.

p257
Although Noriega managed to elude his pursuers for several days, he soon realized that he could not hide indefinitely. Holed up in a small apartment on the edge of Panama City, he became morose. On Sunday afternoon-it was Christmas Eve-he decided to call Monsignor José Sebastian Laboa, the papal nuncio in Panama City. Laboa was an outspoken critic of Noriega and the defense forces, but also a sophisticated diplomat who wished to see this conflict ended without more bloodshed. He agreed to grant Noriega asylum at the nunciatura, as the Vatican embassy was known.

p259
... the defeated strongman walked out. As soon as he was off the embassy's property, American soldiers pounced on him, taped his wrists behind his back, and hustled him into a waiting helicopter. By sunrise the next day, he was in a cell at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Miami.

*

Catastrophic Success

p301
[President George W Bush] represented the continuity of American policy during the long "regime change" century. Bush's decision to invade Iraq was no break with history but a faithful reflection of the same forces and beliefs that had motivated McKinley and most of the presidents who would later sit in his shadow beneath Chartran's historic painting.

Both McKinley and Bush rose to the presidency in eras when Americans were feeling surges of patriotism and religious fervor, and when American corporations were eagerly looking abroad for new markets and sources of raw materials. During their campaigns for the White House, each promised to use American military power with extreme care. Once in office, they justified their overthrow of foreign governments by insisting that the United States sought no advantage for itself and was intervening abroad only "for humanity's sake," as McKinley put it, or, in Bush's words, "to make the world more peaceful and more free."

Neither man was troubled by his ignorance of the countries whose governments he overthrew. McKinley admitted that he had only a vague idea of where to find the Philippines on a map. Bush explained his certainty that the invasion of Iraq would go well by saying, "I rely on my instincts." Both were deeply religious men imbued with the conviction that humanity is locked in a constant struggle between good and evil. Both believed that God was guiding them and that therefore they did not need to ponder abstruse questions of culture and identity before ordering the overthrow of foreign regimes.

The parallels between McKinley's invasion of the Philippines and Bush's invasion of Iraq were startling. Both presidents sought economic as well as political advantage for the United States. Both were also motivated by a deep belief that the United States has a sacred mission to spread its form of government to faraway countries. Neither doubted that the people who lived in those countries would welcome Americans as liberators. Neither anticipated that he would have to fight a long counterinsurgency war to subdue nationalist rebels.

p315
There is no stronger or more persistent strain in the American character than the belief that the United States is a nation uniquely endowed with virtue. Americans consider themselves to be, in Herman Melville's words, "a peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our times." In a nation too new to define itself by real or imagined historical triumphs, and too diverse to be bound together by a shared religion or ethnicity, this belief became the essence of national identity, the conviction that bound Americans to each other and defined their approach to the world. They are hardly the first people to believe themselves favored by Providence, but they are the only ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their political and economic system to others, they are doing God's work.

p315
When the United States acts in the world " it acts, as other nations do, to defend its interests. Americans, however, do not like to hear or believe that their government has such self-centered motives. Generations of American leaders have realized that they can easily win popular support for their overseas adventures if they present them as motivated by benevolence, self-sacrificing charity, and a noble desire to liberate the oppressed. The blessings of freedom that McKinley said he wanted to bestow on Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos, that William Howard Taft said the United States would bring to Central America, and that later presidents claimed they were spreading from Iran to Grenada are the same ones that George W. Bush insisted his invasion of Iraq would bring to people there.

p316
Generations of Americans have eagerly embraced this belief, largely because it reinforces their self-image as uniquely decent people who want only to share their good fortune with others. More sophisticated defenders of the regime change idea make a better argument. They recognize that the United States considers principally its own interests when deciding whether to overthrow foreign governments, but insist that this is fine because what is good for the United States is also good for everyone else. In their view, American power is intrinsically benign because the political and economic system it seeks to impose on other countries will make them richer, freer, and happier-and, as a consequence, create a more peaceful world.

A clear truth lies behind this belief in the transformative value of American influence. For more than a century, Americans have believed they deserve access to markets and resources in other countries. When they are denied that access, they take what they want by force, deposing governments that stand in their way. Great powers have done this since time immemorial. What distinguishes Americans from citizens of past empires is their eagerness to persuade themselves that they are acting out of humanitarian motives.

p318
George W. Bush and his supporters never wavered in their belief that the United States has the right to wage war whenever it deems necessary, regardless of how loudly domestic critics or foreign leaders might protest. "At this moment in history, if there is a problem, we're expected to deal with it," Bush explained. "We are trying to lead the world." American leaders made clear, however, that they did not accept the right of other countries to act this way. Those other nations, they warned, would abuse this right by waging wars of conquest or selfaggrandizement, something they insisted the United States would never do.

Countries that have the power to interfere in foreign lands almost always do so. Military historians since Thucydides, who wrote that nations feel "an innate compulsion to rule when empowered," have observed that no state ever acquires great military strength without using it. As a country grows more powerful, it inevitably becomes greedy and succumbs to the temptation to take what it wants. Time and again over the course of history, greed has led great nations to overreach and sow the seeds of their decline.

p319
The United States has been a world power since the end of the nineteenth century. By using its might to overthrow foreign governments, it acted not in a new or radical way but in accordance with a long-established law of history. When no power restrained it, it did not restrain itself.

Several other factors led the United States to embrace the idea of "regime change." One was the desire to find a means of shaping world events that did not involve old-style colonialism. Another was the rise of giant corporations able to finance election campaigns and buy political power, a phenomenon that is nowhere more pronounced than in the United States. Perhaps the most deeply rooted was the unique combination of beliefs that give Americans a messianic desire to combat evil forces in the world, a conviction that applying military power will allow them to reshape other countries in their image, a certainty that doing so is good for all humanity, and a fervent belief that this is what God wants the United States to do.

One of the most immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of empires and great nations. Some Americans, however, believe their country to be so far beyond comparison with any other country or empire that has ever existed that it has passed beyond the reach of history. This belief has allowed them to embark on ambitious "regime change" projects with supreme confidence that they would succeed, and equal confidence that no matter how badly the projects might turn out, the United States would not suffer because its power is so overwhelming.

For most of the twentieth century, and even more as the twenty-first century dawned, the United States commanded enough military might to defeat any nation or group of nations on the battlefield. The history of this period, however, shows that military power, even combined with political and economic power, is not enough to bend the will of nations. In almost every case, overthrowing the government of a foreign country has, in the end, led both that country and the United States to grief.

p321
Once the Cold War ended, Americans seemed to believe that they no longer needed to teach anyone about their way of life. They came to accept two great fallacies. First, they assumed that the collapse of Communism would lead people around the world to agree that the American political and economic model was best for everyone. Second, they imagined that their overwhelming military power would allow them to crush any power that dissented from this consensus.

If it were possible to control the course of world events by deposing foreign governments, the United States would be unchallenged. It has deposed far more of them than any other modern nation. The stories of what has happened in the aftermath of these operations, however, make clear that Americans do not know what to do with countries after removing their leaders. They easily succumb to the temptation to stage coups or invasions but turn quickly away when the countries where they intervene fall into misery and repression.

p321
The fundamental reason why countries invade other countries, or seek forcibly to depose their governments, has not changed over the course of history. It is the same reason children fight in schoolyards. The stronger one wants what the weaker one has. Most "regime change" operations fit within the larger category of resource wars. When the United States intervenes abroad to gain strategic advantage, depose governments it considers oppressive, or spread its political and religious system, it is also acting in its commercial self-interest. The search for markets, and for access to natural resources, is as central to American history as it has been to the history of every great power in every age.

Overthrow

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