SOWING DRAGON'S TEETH The U.S War Against Nicaragua
Matthews, Robert
"THIS VOTE MUST BE REVERSED," President Reagan fumed immediately after the House of Representatives voted to deny the Administration its latest request for $100 million in aid for the contras....
...Reagan may have convinced himself that all this is true...
...This struggle is by no means unique to this Administration, but Reagan, a master of the media image, is the perfect instrument for carrying it to the public, in a campaign designed to shatter the will of Congress to oppose the executive...
...It is in the context of a White House war, moreover, that the burgeoning network of private support for the contras must be seen...
...In so doing it has been more directly supported by the president than ever before in a covert operation...
...the best actors always believe their lines...
...involvement undermines the effort to establish the legitimacy of the contra war...
...For another, the inflated rhetoric with which the Administration has portrayed the contras-an army of terrorists with no political program, led by the despised members of the former National Guard-has made it difficult to abandon them as their military prospects sink to the level of their political potential...
...But as this issue makes clear, the contra war also expresses the contradictions of such a crusade...
...He pledged his "solemn determination to come back again and again until this battle is won...
...The third article in this Report argues that in promoting this network, the White House is not only rallying its right flank, but effectively deploying that flank against Congress under the banner of patriotic consensus...
...The epitome of a low-risk, low-cost strategy, the contra war is designed to undermine the Nicaraguan government without committing U.S...
...But as the contra forces founder in the field and falter in the media, the CIA has moved increasingly to manage every aspect of their activities...
...foreign policy...
...In a sense this Administration is successfully turning Clausewitz upside down, forging politics into a continuation of war by other means...
...Stabilization, which may now involve low-intensity conflict, is primarily the Pentagon's province...
...allies, via efficient armed forces and civic action, is replaced by destruction and demoralization of "enemy" states, via proxy armies...
...Since then he has continued to portray Nicaragua as a "grave threat to our country and our continent," accusing its leaders of everything from drug trafficking to trying "to build a Libya on our doorstep," by providing refuge for "all sorts of international terrorists...
...war in Nicaragua as the archetype of a White House operation...
...The first article presents the policy context-the Reagan Doctrine, which commits the United States to rolling back Soviet influence in the Third World by means of support for anti-communist insurgencies...
...But behind the increasingly shrill anti-Sandinista rhetoric is a play within a play more serious: the conflict over who will conduct U.S...
...For one, the very extent of U.S...
...troops...
...Two days later he went on the radio, repeating: "I cannot accept the House action as final...
...This issue of Report on the Americas, written by NACLA researcher Robert Matthews, focuses on the U.S...
...When the moral as well as the military will of the United States is harnessed to such a gang, the risks, and the costs, of failure are very high indeed...
...Stabilization of U.S...
...subversion, as Matthews shows in the second article, is a project conceived and implemented by the CIA and the White House...
...the president or Congress...
...Although inspired by the same anti-communist impulse as the counterinsurgency programs of presidents since John F. Kennedy, and in many ways their logical extension, insurgency operations are also their very opposite, in both goals and tactics...
Vol. 20 • July 1986 • No. 4
