by JOHN TIRMAN
For all his bluster about the use of military power and his plaintive, post hoc calls to action in Vietnam, President Ronald Reagan was restrained in deploying American troops and even more cautious in committing them to combat. His military forays (in addition to bombing Libya) amounted to two ventures. The first was in Lebanon, where he deployed peacekeeping troops in 1983, only to see 300 of them killed in two separate terrorist assaults. His response was to “cut and run,” to use the phrase familiar to his followers but rarely applied to him, actions doubtlessly emboldening politically violent groups in the region who must have reasoned that if Reagan could so easily be dislodged and neutered, then Americans were unlikely to take up the fight against them. Within hours of the Beirut debacle—the second bombing there took the lives of 270 marines—Reagan launched an invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to depose a leftist leader and protect American students. This action, following policies meant to destabilize the government, was the 135th time U.S. forces had intervened in Latin America and the Caribbean. Supposedly a shot over the bow of Cuba, the message was lost on Castro but was far more successful in diverting the American news media and public from the deadly failure in Lebanon.
These two incidents aside, Reagan’s preferred method of military intervention was to use other people to do the fighting, and he took aim at Marxist governments with these would-be liberators. With fulsome support, he set out to undo the Soviet puppet state in Afghanistan (and Soviet troops occupying it), the Vietnamese control over Cambodia, the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and the postcolonial state of Angola. The leaders of the last two were liberators themselves, overthrowing centuries of colonial or neocolonial dictators and appearing to enjoy considerable popularity and legitimacy. The Cambodian fiasco was a direct consequence of the U.S. war in Indochina, a war in which Cambodia was fully in play. And the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, while clearly a catastrophe of their own making, was one of the reverberations of the 1979 revolution in Iran, another signal event with American fingerprints all over it.
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