Grenada and the Falklands How US overcame the Vietnam syndrome

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- Deaths in the Grenadan invasion may total over 1,500 LAST WEEK in a diseussion article ALAN THORNETT argued for an analysis of the Grenada invasion which recognised the centrality of the Falklands war as a factor in the turn by imperialism towards overt military intervention.

This week, in a more extended article, MICK that Thatcher's South Atlantic war was "little and anachronistic", and that the turn by imperialism towards intervention began as far back as 1978.

ALAN Thornett's article in last week's Socialist is unfortunate for number of reasons.

Attempting to construct a picture of world politics now around the axis of the Falklands war, Alan Thornett cannot help but play down, distort, misconstrue and misrepresent the real dynamic behind both the US invasion of Grenada and the present war drive.

If you start with the Falklands syndrome', and use it to explain everything subsequent to -the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the French sale of Super Etendard jets, the possible invasion by the US of the Gulf -then you are using an approach to current history which owes more to the method of magicians secking the philosopher's stone than Marxism.

Imperialism is imperialism. Alan Thornett, if I have understood him correctly, is saying that without the Falklands war the whole period we are now going through would be substantially different. It is of course impossible to answer such an idea with 100% certainty.

What is possible is to say that the general line of amperialist development would necessarily have taken its present course.

Direct military infervention has always been an option for imperialism dependent of course, on who the apponent is and what the likely consequences are. Just as the state, in the final analysis, isa body of armed men. so naked aggression is the final weapon of imperialism. To say otherwise - that this could only happen because of the Falklands is to reject the basic nature of imperialism.

It is to imply though obviously Alan Thornett does not actually hold such an opinion - that imperialist militarism and aggression is merely a policy and not a basic and ineradicable part of its nature and that Thatcher's anachronistic little South Atlantic war was a great pioneering. trail-blazing innovation.

This is nonsense in terms both of history and current world politics. It does not make sense to think that modern history even post-Vietnam War history begins with the Falklands War.

Better to put the Falklands War into the real picture of post-Vietnam War history. As far as I can see its place there is at best a minor one.

US destabilisation. At the end of the '60s Nixon and Kissenger's policy of detente was introduced. Not since the war di d East and West seem to have s o much in SOS6 common largely freed from ideological rhetoric (contrast Nixon over Czechoslovakia - he was inaugurated five months after the invasion of Czechoslovakia - and Reagan over Poland).

Detente was to provide mutual benefits for both sides. The Russians would gain much needed technology and grain supplies, discussion on nuclear weapons were to be opened up and in return the USSR would help extract the US from Indo-China with an 'honourable' settlement and contain other third world movements.

There was of course nothing new about this poliey. In its essentials it was the continuation of the division of the world into spheres of influence which had been the foundation of post war stability.

This system - which relies on bureaucratic and military repression both East and West -remains the basic parameter within which both imperialism and the Kremlin operate.

However, from the initial success of the Paris accords the policy collapsed into one of devastating failure for the Americans. 13 revolutions. Between 1974 and 1980 (by which time the policy had long been abandoned) 13 regimes had come to power which, to varying degrees, were hostile to the West. This breakdown between imperialist powers and subject nations has been the main destabilising effect on US foreign policy.

And then in 1979 the USSR armed forces moved into territory not already conceded to it in the 1940s - they invaded AfghanisThese transformations have taken five basic forms.

1) April/May 1975 victory in Indo-China. NLF. Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge. All were led by Stalinist parties which had fought protracted guerrilla struggles.

2) Guinea Bissau, Mozambique. Cape Verde. Sao Tome. Angola. Between 1974 and November 1975 the former Portuguese colonies in Africa were granted independence following the fall of the Cactano regime. Long established guerrilla movements came to power though not through direct military victory The Ethiopian revolution. September 1974 and the coup in Afghanistan. April 1978: pre-capitalist monarchies were overthrown by revolution from above carried out by the armed forces. both of hem looking towards Russia (E hiopia after an initial

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period under US patronage) for their methods and models of modernisation.

4) Grenada and Nicaragua in 1979. Each took place against the background of a corrupt ruling class with little social base, the former after a bloodless coup, the latter after protracted fighting. Both saw socialist parties working in tandem with bourgeois forces.

5) Iran, February 1979, the first successful urban based revolution since 1917, finding a political expression in reactionary clerical radicalism. As Halliday (in "The Second Cold War" from which much of this material is taken) points out, the relevance and implications of these victories for the future are limited because the form of oppression they overthrew - i.e. colonialism, pre-capitalist monarchies - are rare in the world today. (By far the largest group of oppressed and occupied nations is in the Soviet block).

The Kremlin's response. While these revolutions took place independently of Moscow, once they had occured there has been varying degrees of self-serving support for them. The underlying dynamic for this was the bureaucracy's "tendency to extend its power, its prestige, its revenue. This is the element of imperialism' in the widest sense of the word which was the property in the past of all monarchies. oligarchies, ruling castes" , as Leon Trotsky described it, over four decades ago. Two basic reasons allowed for the Kremlin to react in this manner and must in part be why they dared behave in Afghanistan with a boldness unknown since the mid 1940s.

a) By the beginning of the 1970s the Russians had virtually caught up with the Americans in nuclear strike capability (part of the reason for detente and nuclear arms talks was to once again give the US a massive superiority). This was a fundamental reversal of the cold war settlement. where the US had a massive nuclear advantage (which was decisively shown in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962).

Near parity was seen as an achievement for the Russians and a defeat for the Americans.

Mb) The defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal traumatised public opinion and effectively paralysed the Exccutive's ability to carry out overt acts of aggression and severely limited their ability to engase in covert opentions.

After Vietnam the US leaders and everything militaristic was so discredited in America that they had to abandon conscription.

The above are the major elements in the collapse in foreign policy during the "70s and, it should be added, the destabilisation of the whole post war structure because these forces also fell outside of the bureaucratic grip of Stalinism.

Now Alan Thornett's basic idea is that: "Thatcher's victory over Argentina broke through the 'Vietnam syndrome' and gave a reen light for imperialism to use force openly once again." While the 'syndrome' was real enough, the Americans managed, as we shall show. to overcome it long before the invasion of the Falklands.

The effect of the Vietnam defeat was felt in two main areas.

Undermined

1. Foreign policy. As I have shown the detente policy was undermined by the success of various revolutions, while domestic considerations impinged on the ability to carry out an aggressive foreign policy.

But the US military establishment remained intact and by 1978 they had effectively hammered out a consensus in support of the new Cold War. The purpose of the Second Cold War was the same as the purpose of the first - to drum up American support for an arms drive and for a newly aggressive and selfassertive posture towards the Russian "Empire of Darkness".

2. The response of the state. One of the myths perpetuated by Reagan is that detente disarmed longer than 400 words please: longer letters are liable to be cut.

US defence budget instigated Congress.

Plainly, it is not as Alan Thornett asserts that "After the Nicaragua revolution, Carter under pressure from Pentagon generals stepped up the US war drive ...

The turn around in Congress took place in 1978 with the increased defence budget (predating both the Iran and Afghanistan revolutions).

When the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza in 1979 the decisive change in US policy had already occured a year earlier.

Weakness

Given the weakness of the left and the deep-seated nationalism of the working class, the reactionary, racist bigotry of Reagan found support. There was an 8% swing to the Republicans from blue collar workers. It was not that people were supporting a closet cold war monger. He was right up front calling for a crusade to make defenceless America great again.

Reagan adopted the policy akin to the Republicans of the earl '50s who talked in terms of negotiating from strength, conventional and nuclear, of rolling back communism and who, under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles practised brinkmanship (i.e. taking the world to the brink of nuclear war to win).

It was on this foreign policy ticket that Reagan won the election. 60% of a poll supported his unheard-of increase in armaments expenditure in 1981. It-was not. as Thornett asserts, that Thatcher's victory broke through the Vietnam syndrome.

Not only do all the facts point to "defenceless" America getting over its moral qualms by 1978, four years before Thatcher's war - but in 1980 they elected a President who hasn't just started talking as Thornett would have us believe, "in the language of imperialism on the offensive" but has made it a point to be an offensive imperialist.

By attempting to find a "first car'se" in ... South Atlantic. Thornett makes himself incapable of seeing the wood for the trees in the build-up of the imperialist offensive.

Rules

to rolling back 'communLimits ism'.

Despite the rhetoric, Reagan has kept to the rules. The Russians, on their side, have seen their allies Syria and the PLO attacked by Israel and the virtual annexation of South Lebanon, and now the invasion of Grenada.

Both sides know that the world exists within a "balance of terrór"./ The other major factor which necesarily inhibits Reagan is the likely effect of any major engagement in resurrecting hostility to US interventionism as US casualties mounted The mechanics of the invasion. Despite Reagan's rhetoric, his mass arms build up and increase in covert US operations, he had not, as far as the right wing is concerned, delivered the goods. Afghanistan, the Korean airliner, and then the massive loss of life in the Lebanon with no immediately discernible enemy - there was little Reagan could do. This smacked of Carter and the US hostages in Iran, of an ineffective President.

The 'military coup' and the shooting of Bishop the previous week pushed Grenada further into the Soviet sphere' and opened up a 'major' problem for the US both in terms of prestige and destabilisation of the area.

At the same time it gave them the option for intervention. Now while Reagan necessarily took a gamble it was, compared with Thatcher's, a very small. one from a logistical standpoint. The Cuban construction workers gave as good as they got against the best technologically armed army in the world, but the shooting of Bishop had decisively weakened support for the New Jewel Movement, so the US had an easier job than they might have expected. Reagan's victory has been on two fronts. Firstly he has shown himself to be a strong President and secondly he has in the traditional manner, asserted imperialist domination of the area.

Where next?

Where will Reagan go next? He has obviously got the bit between his teeth and will not be satisfied with Grenada. But as long as the rationality of the US policy-making bureaucracy remains relatively intact there are limits to Reagan's gunboat diplomacy.

Finally, something 1 agree wholeheartedly with Alan Thornett on: when he states that the international working class is the only force which can influence the situation. Undoubtedly Reagan's action will begin to generate an opposition in the USA just as he has now made it harder for Thatcher to hold the line in Britain.

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O'SULLIVAN, drawing upon material from Fred Halliday's book "The Sec- ond Cold War' , argues

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