Editorials

...And all this amidst evocations of national security and the sacrifices of American servicemen...

...All this was apparently known and conveniently ignored by Washington...

...Or can I believe on the behalf of another, or cause another to believe...

...This too is part of Luther's legacy...

...Confusion and error accompany any military action, but something more was involved here: an energetic campaign to plaster one alibi after another over an action that the administration had undertaken for a reason it could not publicly defend, to display its willingness to counter pro-Soviet governments with military might...

...The Soviet invasion was on an entirely different scale and has been brutally pursued against determined national resistance...

...In one he acts by his own will and counsel, without the precepts and mandates of God, namely in things inferior to him...

...It was as if Christ were everyone who has lost the securities of tribal solidarity and fallen into the exposed anguish and responsibilities of the emerging autonomous self-who must work out his or her salvation in fear and trembling, alone...

...Take his troublesome political theology, for instance, enough to bring a smile to any Metternich or Henry Kissinger: "Man is divided into two kingdoms...

...Their astonishing novelty in his own time is lost on us precisely because he brought into being so much of the world we live in...

...America's action has reinforced the pattern of quick military strikes, meant to confront objecting nations withfaits accomplis, that buys success at the price of putting the world on hair trigger...

...ambassador and begged to endorse this, which he did not...

...The history of modern religious thought, rather than justifying God's ways towards humankind, has consisted largely of taking Job's part and protesting the inscrutable ways of God...

...Nonetheless, peace and our own security remain served by the taint that still attaches, despite all the resigned or cynical concessions to power politics, to nations wielding military might without sufficient cause...

...Moscow announces itself "invited" into Afghanistan, denounces Solidarity as a tool of the CIA in Poland, and blows up very real failings of the West into propaganda specters...

...For we still live within the story of the self with which Luther wrestled...

...International law, full of loopholes as it is and frequently honored in the breech, is not absolute, nor is the principle of nonintervention...

...He is rather a figure whose very conflicts and splits display our own, a man whose passionate quest for the truth denote him as one who wrestled, as we must, with a complex process that resists all closure...

...Indeed, if Grenadians are happier about what has happened than even the victorious Americans, the reason is not hard to uncover...

...Invading another country is not a small matter...

...The rest of the world, and the U.S...

...even invading a small country is not a small matter...

...One hundred bodies of victims of Grenadian extremists were found in a mass grave - admitted untrue...

...It wanted this invasion...

...The cynicism it nurtures has already been manifested in a number of "tough-minded" celebrations of the invasion, and eventually that cynicism will flower among the invasion's critics as well, here and abroad...

...The evidence that the Grenadian hardliners were threatening American medical students has never emerged;what has emerged instead is considerable evidence that the Grenadians were assuring the Americans' safety and that obstacles to the students' evacuation came not from Grenada but from other Caribbean states already involved in the invasion plans...

...It sets the Grenada action apart from other recent Great Power interventions...

...Reagan declared...

...Grenada's neighbors had cause for concern...

...Intelligence reports" indicated Grenadian plans to take hostages - later denied...

...Despite the loss of life and the material destruction, a hundred thousand Grenadians may be more secure as a result of this military action...

...So did the other Eastern Caribbean states...

...Students of totalitarianism describe its atmosphere of falsehood, where deception no longer deceives but simply becomes part of a debasing language everyone is forced to speak...

...The invasion twisted international law into a pretzel and undermined the U.S.'s own invocations of the principle of nonintervention...

...Only the insistently promoted notion of danger to the American students rationalized the demand for nothing less than an invasion, and an invasion now...

...The press was excluded - for its own good, of course...

...There will be much to pay for our great victory in Grenada, and in parts of the world of far greater importance...

...Around the world the American action has been compared to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a comparison that made President Reagan bristle, with some justification...

...Both superpowers are determined to maintain veto power over any change of regime in their self-defined spheres of influence...

...Grenada's airport had been closed -false...

...Like many third-world governments, including the one they succeeded, they were a burden on their own people...

...But with these important differences noted (and they have been noted by some critics of the invasion, for instance in Le Monde), at least one frightening parallel remains between America's neat, little exercise in intervention and the Soviets' big, messy ones...

...Can I give the promises of God to another, even if he be an unbeliever...

...But the situation was complex enough - even the head of the Caribbean contingent in the invading forces expressed doubts about the threat posed by Grenadian arms - that alternatives to a preemptive strike against a still potential danger should have been pursued...

...This is the plainest truth . . . Who can receive or accept, on another's behalf, the promises of God, which requires faith from each one individually...

...Yet the greatest loss may be at home...

...Of which the late Gregory Bateson was fond of saying, especially to assembled scientists, that these Reformation debates on symbolism represented the last time in Western history that the issues were worth burning a person at the stake...

...The U.S...

...It is not just his assuring faith in the midst of complication that claims our attention, but even, if not especially, his mistakes...

...Under the circumstances, some of the Grena-dian enthusiasm should be taken with a grain of salt...

...and not being able to justify this by any accepted standards of international conduct, they resort to the most transparent falsifications...

...Now Washington, in the same spirit that has characterized its whole Central American policy, plays the same game...

...By the nineteenth century, the solitary existentialist believer looked more like a permanently afflicted Job than Jesus triumphant over death, and for many Jesus himself became just another abandoned sufferer indistinguishable from Job...

...prompting ana the treaty, which we didn't sign, was irrelevant and in conflict with treaties we did sign...

...With Luther, indeed, the Christ-story began to be told in a new way, as the story of a self...

...The themes he articulated-the deadli-ness of self-justifying "works," the unresolvable ambiguity of faith, the hiddenness of God for the well-lighted, rational self, and the implications of Christian freedom ("free lord of all, subject to none . . . dutiful servant of all, subject to all") for peasant consciousness-raising and insurgency-all these remain on our agenda, as disturbing for us as they were for Luther...

...Where Dante's purgatory was a seven-story climb after death, Luther's focus was this-worldly...

...The evidence so far come to light does not show that Grenada was on the verge of becoming "a Soviet-Cuban colony" and "major military bastion," as Mr...

...The recent coup in Grenada reflected a Cuban-Soviet design - no evidence, and Cuba denounced the killing of Maurice Bishop...

...In invading Grenada, we have invaded ourselves - with mendacity and sham...

...Such cause was not present in the case of Grenada...

...Telling the story this way hasn't worked out...

...The evidence does show a sizable arms buildup, not of the variety threatening to the U.S., but sufficient either to cow the home population, create fear or mischief in nearby islands, or supply other revolutionary forces in the area...

...The students were in danger - the med school chancellor was called by the U.S...

...Euphemisms were invented - this was a "rescue," not an invasion...

...These words come from a treatise on the Eucharist...

...But the Grenadians' contentment is far from a conclusive answer to the disturbing questions this invasion raises...

...acted only on the basis of an invitation and an Eastern Caribbean treaty - some evidence points to U.S...

...Current ecological policy and geopolitics still submit, in too large a measure, to Luther's separation of worldly affairs from the things of God...

...In Luther, our restless molecular systems found a catalyst for that chemical chain reaction we call the modern West...

...Their thuggishness, however, was scarcely in the same league with that of some of the thugs Washington has chosen to generously aid and abet in the same region...

...In Afghanistan, for example, and in Nicaragua, the populations have hardly welcomed their "liberators...

...Not since the days of Vietnam has America been given such a strong dose of that climate...

...At least 1,100 "well-trained, professional" Cuban soldiers were on Grenada disguised as construction workers - Havana's figure of 784 turned out to be about right, and most were in truth construction workers...

...LUTHER'S LEGACY Born one-half millennium ago this November 10, Martin Luther's words still ring out as if spoken yesterday...

...in particular, is not...

...If throwing out thugs were our concern, then the Rangers and Marines ought to be heading toward Haiti or Guatemala, or perhaps even El Salvador where American embassy officials have identified the Constituent Assembly's security chief and other ranking government officials as directing and financing death squads which have assassinated thousands of Salvadorans...

...he transformed hell, purgatory, and heaven into the despair, uncertainty, and precarious faith of the newly assertive self of a burgeoning bourgeois civilization...

...And as unfinished-for truthfully Luther is not a model of, or for, the settled mind...

...Grenada was ruled by an increasingly bizarre and fratricidal group of Marxists...

...Still, the reaction has been so widespread that critics of the invasion cannot ignore it...