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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, NOVEMBER 4, 1983
PAGE 7
living under several days of a 24-hour-long curfew imposed by the new, more
radical revolutionaries.
But the sudden downturn of events on Grenada provided Mr. Reagan with an
opportunity. He had long been concerned over the construction, by Cuban
engineers, of a 10,000 foot-long runway on Grenada, an airstrip that could
help ferry Cuban proxy soldiers to world trouble spots and to refuel East
Bloc planes transporting arms to Central America. Reports also indicated
that the Cuban presence on Grenada was being vastly expanded, placing the
tiny, vulnerable democracies of the Caribbean in jeopardy.
When the troubled leaders of the six-nation Organization of Eastern Carib
bean States (Antigua, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Kitts-Nevis, Montserrat and
St. Vincent), plus non-members Barbados and Jamaica, appealed to the U.S.
to act, Mr. Reagan could not say no. Both U.S. allies and adversaries were
watching to see the U.S. response. Now also was the right time and place
for America to shed its sel£-imposed Vietnam-syndrome reluctance to use
military power in defense of a clear threat to its national interest. Re
ported the November 7, 1983 edition of TIME:
ThP. Administration seized on the situation in Grenada to demon
strate, after years of near paralysis, that the U.S. is again
able to use mi1itary force as an extension of its political
will.... The takeover was meant to show that the U.S. could
forcefully roll back a tide of Soviet successes in the Third
World.
To help ensure the success of the military intervention, the President took
the unprecedented precaution of excluding members of the press from parti
cipation in the initial assault.
He did not want televised pictures of
fallen U.S. Marines or Rangers to dominate TV coverage, tugging at the
collective U.S. heartstring and producing nationwide second guessing.
(George F. Will, in his November 7 NEWSWEEK column, supported the Presi
dent's decision by saying: "As I have argued here before, if there had been
television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two countries: the carnage
would have caused the North to let the South go.")
What the U.S. troops found confirmed the Administration's suspicions:
Grenada was indeed being turned into a new Cuban fortress designed to
spread its cancer throughout the Caribbean island chain. Vast storehouses
of East Bloc weapons were uncovered. Seized documents showed that Fidel
Castro was soon going to increase the number of armed Cubans on the island
(with a population of less than 100,000 people} up to nearly 7,000 men. In
addition to the abnormally large number (49) of diplomats in the Soviet
embassy in the capital of St. George's, the Americans found ten East Ger
mans, three Bulgarians, and twenty-four North Koreans.
Despite the evidence confirming the correctness of the U.S. action, there
has been the usual hypocritical howl of protest both at home and abroad
(though privately many nations were happy over the incident).
The U.N.
General Assembly "deeply deplored" the American-led intervention (in which
troops from Barbados, Jamaica, and four of the six OECS countries partici
pated).
U.S. allies overseas said tut-tut.
The British government was
embarrassed, first of all because it had done nothing all along to reverse
the steadily leftward political drift on Grenada (an independent Common
wealth member) since 1979, and secondly, of course, because the United