.jpg)
Notable archival sources in the USA, Britain and elsewhere, as well as leading media enterprises in and out of our region, would be chockfull of materials mocking the terrifying lies told by the then Reagan administration, with pitiful acquiescence by then CARICOM governments –particularly in Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica and St Lucia — about an “international communist plot” involving Cuba and the then Soviet Union to establish a military beachhead in Grenada.
One of the notorious claims — without EVIDENCE — by the Reagan administration was that Grenada’s new airport, then under construction with a long runway at Point Saline as a major development project in partnership with Cuba, was designed to also serve as ‘a Soviet military base’, and that this had implications for the sovereignty and security of nations in the Caribbean/Latin America region.
Readers may recall that the length of the new airport’s runway (9,000 feet), was less than those in, for instance, Trinidad and Tobago; Barbados or St. Lucia, which boasted international airports in the Southern and Eastern Caribbean.
Further, then US Congressman from California, Ronald Dellum, in reporting on a “fact-finding mission” to the US House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee, was to quote the US Atlantic Fleet Commander as quite dismissive of the airport having any military significance. That, he said to Dellum, as reported, was a “non sequitur”.
Of course, Dellum’s fact-finding mission report was to have no impact on the Reagan administration which kept moving ahead in full speed with its invasion plans that were already well advanced, if not concluded, BEFORE the bloody self-destruction of the “revo” that had been launched in 1979 with much promise for fundamental changes by the slain Maurice Bishop and other leading “comrades” of the PRG.
Contrasting leadership
The now late Dominica Prime Minister, Mary Eugenia Charles, who had proudly shared televised coverage with President Regan at The White House as he announced the timed US military invasion of Grenada by some 1,900 troops on October 25, 1983, was in sharp contrast to the stand taken by that fierce, passionate defender of Caribbean sovereignty, Barbados’ late Prime Minister Errol Barrow.
As then Opposition Leader, Barrow was to have his own earlier warnings confirmed by the US military invasion. While the plotting and active arrangements for the invasion were secretly occurring, Barrow went public in August of that year with his information, as reported by the media, that the administration of then Prime Minister Tom Adams had been “stockpiling medical supplies for apparent war preparations…”
Prime Minister Adams was to offer a sharp denial of such preparations or any involvement by his government. However, with the invasion of Grenada a ‘fait accompli’, and governments of Barbados, Jamaica and OECS openly lined up with the USA, Barrow was to denounce what he described to the media as “high-noon cowboy” jingoism of a US President of Hollywood fame, for the “military war he had authorized against that small island state.
The unprecedented invasion by the USA of a former British colony–amid conflicting claims whether then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been previously officially alerted—was the climax of a concerted campaign, directly orchestrated out of Washington, to get rid of the then People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop.
It was the CARICOM government that Washington just loved to hate and which, unlike Cuba that it hates even more, it felt it could easily take out.
Ironically, the PRG was to implode, six days BEFORE the invasion, with the execution of “comrades” by “comrades” and a ‘Revolutionary Military Council’ (RMC) established while grieving, traumatized Grenadians were grappling to cope with survival challenges amid political promises of new elections soon and cooperation with foreign governments and institutions.
But none of those occurrences had any impact on President Reagan’s “urgent fury” military invasion that went into effect precisely at 05.40 am on October 25, 1983.
No evidence
And, as was to grotesquely recur three decades later this month, the US-led invasion of Iraq, like the military invasion of Grenada, was ruthlessly carried WITHOUT ANY HARD EVIDENCE to justify such a development.
Further, while the USA, under the Republican George Bush administration had arrogantly ignored any referencing to the United Nations about its planned invasion of Iraq–the shattering, mind boggling human and material consequences of which are still being experienced by the suffering Iraqis—the Reagan administration was to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning mighty America’s military invasion of the little Caribbean island of Grenada.
The tragic, painful relevance of the US military invasion of Iraq with that of Grenada’s 20 years earlier, is the comparison with the dangerous lies deliberately spawned by the USA to justify both wars. It had NO EVIDENCE of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Neither has it ever produced EVIDENCE of the PRG’s involvement in any Soviet/Cuba plan to misuse Grenada as a beach-head for “international communism”.
And while Britain’s former Prime Minister Blair remains driven on the defensive for roles identified with President Bush’s war plans against Iraq, ostensibly to capture “stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” that were never found, it is perhaps relevant to recall also the distancing of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from President Reagan’s “urgent fury” war against Grenada, according to Reagan’s then Secretary of State, George P Schultz, in his published “Turmoil and Triumph”.
Margaret Thatcher’s stand
The British position on the invasion “remained a puzzle,” he wrote. “Whatever the reasons for Prime Minister Thatcher’s position, she did not exhibit any particular concern for the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America…
“At any rate,” Shultz added, “Margaret Thatcher and her government opposed the American rescue operation, and did so vehemently…” He quoted Thatcher as declaring:
“We in the Western countries, the Western democracies, use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into independent sovereign territories…If you are going to pronounce a new law that wherever communism reigns against the will of the people, even though it’s happened internally there, the USA shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world…”
Sadly, we no longer have among us quite a few of the CARICOM political leaders/officials and those in the USA itself who were either proponents or opponents of the US military invasion of Grenada.
Nevertheless, without, distressing anyone, either here, in Britain or America, who were varyingly involved in the US invasion of Grenada, the firm stand of Margaret Thatcher, the reputed ‘Iron Lady”, is quite relevant to any serious assessment of what a Washington administration under President Reagan had done—without EVIDENCE—in Grenada three decades ago, only to be callously repeated by another Republican administration, that of President George Bush, ten years later this month against Iraq.
