Excerpted from the transcript of this
Democracy Now! interview with Stephen Kinzer:
AMY GOODMAN: This
is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we continue our conversation with
Stephen Kinzer, Part 2 of that conversation.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well,
Stephen Kinzer, I’d like to ask you about one of, to my mind—you covered in
your book Overthrow—one of the
all-time unfair fights in world history, perhaps one of the most egregious
examples of a large nation attacking a small nation. I’m talking about the
invasion of Grenada in 1985, I think it was, under Ronald Reagan, a country
that has maybe one-third of the population of the Bronx and assaulted by
American troops. Could you talk about the invasion of Grenada?
AMY GOODMAN: ’83.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: '83,
I'm sorry. 1983.
STEPHEN KINZER: This
really is a remarkable episode, as you pointed out. So, it happened in 1983,
soon after Reagan had come into office. Grenada is a tiny island in the
Caribbean. Its entire population could fit into the Rose Bowl in California.
That’s how small it is. But the United States was looking for a victory. Reagan
came into office with this idea that the U.S. had to shake off what he called
the Vietnam syndrome, the syndrome that we were, as he called it, a pitiful,
helpless giant. He wanted to show that the United States was still able to
crush enemies. But as was always the case during the Cold War, we were never
able to strike against our real enemies. Nobody ever proposed bombing Moscow or
invading China. So, we had to go after countries that weren’t really our
enemies but were smaller and easier to push around. And there hardly was a
country smaller and easier to push around than poor little Grenada.
Grenada had inserted itself into the Cold War. The Grenadan leadership
had been friendly to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to Fidel Castro in Cuba. And
somehow the United States developed this idea that this little island could
somehow be a threat to the United States. So, partly for that reason, but I
think largely for reasons of politics, for reasons of appearance, the United
States, under Reagan, decided we’re looking for a place to attack. There was
turmoil inside Grenada, suddenly. There was a rebellion within the ruling
group, and one of the groups turned on the other. The prime minister was
assassinated. And in that turmoil, Reagan saw a chance, that we would go in and
say we were trying to rescue the people of Grenada, save American citizens who
were there, and show that America could still stand strong in the world. So we
invaded. Obviously, the invasion was predetermined in its outcome.
But what I find particularly egregious about this is what happened
afterwards. So, this is a tiny, little country. The United States could have made
it into the jewel of the Caribbean. It’s such a small place. We could have made
it into a paradise, for nothing, for the cost of a toilet seat on a B-52
bomber. So, we didn’t do that. We just turned away and left. And this is so
true with all of our other interventions. You might say we intervened in some
places to overthrow leaders or regimes that were unfair to their people, but we
never tried to impose other ones that were good. We turned our back
immediately. And we allow the tyrants that we impose, in places like Iran and
Guatemala, to do whatever they want, once we’ve placed them in power. So,
Grenada has stumbled along. It’s not in a terrible condition. But we missed a
great opportunity. And that’s because once we’ve overthrown a government, we feel
we’re finished. We’ve put in someone we like. We can turn away and look for the
next country.
Please continue this transcript, and to
watch all the video interviews with Stephen Kinzer, please go here: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/14/extended_interview_stephen_kinzer_on_america
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