ENDGAME U.S. Military Strategy in Central America by Allan Nairn
THE ELECTIONS IN EL SALVADOR MAY BE over, but the war goes on. In Congress, Jose Napoleon Duarte's success at the polls induced a spell of euphoria, just as the revelations of the CIA mining of...
...Actions on that scale can be prevented only if the moral conscience of this nation is reawakened...
...Yet these flareups of congressional passion seem curiously irrelevant to the war that is playing itself out in Central America...
...troops could get drawn willy-nilly into the conflict...
...Washington's surrogate forces in the region-the Salvadorean Army and the Nicaraguan contras-seem to have reached the limits of their usefulness...
...Since then, his writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic...
...This Report pieces together the evolution of U.S...
...The pattern and logic of events in Central America seem to elude even the more perceptive of correspondents...
...Accidental war" is the favorite scenario of those few people in Congress and the press who grasp that the Reagan Administration stands poised to cross a threshold in Central America by sending U.S...
...So far, the press has done little better...
...Instead, they talk of "pretexts" for war...
...This issue of NACLA's Report on the Americas, written by New York-based journalist Allan Nairn, offers an entirely different analysis...
...It is tempting to say that the consequences of intervention would be incalculable-but they are not...
...It is based on the idea that the Administration has no coherent policy, and is stumbling out of control...
...If they are a barometer to anything, it is the collective inability of Congress to ask the right questions-why the war will not stop, or indeed how and why it is being waged in the first place...
...Grenada was the first example of that new capacity, even though the stage was miniature...
...What comes next...
...B-52 carpet bombing of El Salvador perhaps, or a full-scale invasion of Nicaragua...
...Thus Hedrick Smith of The New York Times, who is nothing if not factually well informed, spoke with alarm on a recent TV talk show of "all kinds of ways in which U.S...
...diplomats and military officials in the region, he reported, no longer refer to "accidents" that might trigger a conflict...
...His most recent article, published in The Progressive, is a study of 20 years of U.S...
...armed forces to intervene anywhere in the world at short notice...
...the Big Pine exercises in Honduras have put most of the key assault units for a Central American invasion through their paces...
...It is the story of sophisticated political maneuvers in Washington and of a renewed ability of the U.S...
...troops into combat...
...On his return from three months of research in Central America, Nairn told us of an alarming new development...
...support for the Salvadorean death squads...
...In Congress, Jose Napoleon Duarte's success at the polls induced a spell of euphoria, just as the revelations of the CIA mining of Nicaraguan ports had provoked a brief bout of anguish...
...soldiers and Central American peasants, can be assessed with some accuracy, and this Report does so...
...Allan Nairn's work has caused ripples in Washington since 1980, when he published a detailed expose of ties between the Reagan Administration and Guatemala's far Right...
...military policy in Central America since the Sandinista revolution of 1979...
...The material cost and the death toll, in U.S...
Vol. 18 • May 1984 • No. 3
