16

Prospects

The United States plainly has the military capacity, and perhaps the moral capacity as well, to pursue its historical vocation of torturing Nicaragua while strengthening “democracy” in the standard Orwellian sense of the term in El Salvador and other dependencies. With regard to Nicaragua, the rational policy for a violent state with unparalleled resources and limited domestic constraints would be to refrain from outright invasion and to persist in the CIA program of 1981 outlined by David MacMichael at the World Court hearings, cited earlier (chapter 6). The U.S. surely possesses the means to “‘turn Nicaragua into the Albania of Central America,’ that is, poor, isolated, and radical,” as a State Department insider reportedly boasted in 1981.1 Educated opinion will pose no problems, as long as the costs remain slight, including the domestic cost of an aroused public. Once “regional standards” have been restored by violence and we have fit the starving and miserable people in our backyard “back into their Central American mode,” we may proceed to attend to their fate with the same solicitude we have shown throughout our history, meanwhile reveling in this renewed demonstration of our traditional benevolence.

This could be a winning strategy, given the balance of forces, and it already has achieved notable successes, both in deterring the threat of social reform in Nicaragua and, most dramatically, with regard to elite opinion at home. But even with efficient damage control operations, the disarray in Washington may influence this rational strategy. It may impede escalation to direct aggression, but it also might impel the policy-makers of the Reagan administration, or their successors, to accelerate these efforts before constraints upon state terror mount to an unacceptable degree.

Reaganite “conservatives” no doubt hoped to leave a permanent stamp on American politics. They intended to prove that violence pays. Operation Truth and the Office of Public Diplomacy, their guidelines dutifully observed by our free institutions in their forays into “enemy territory” at home, successfully constructed a series of demons before whom we must cringe in terror. Fortunately, our leading thinkers tell us, “The Administration is trying to get rid of two scoundrels in Tripoli and Managua,” along with their cohorts elsewhere.2 If these miserable creatures could be destroyed by violence, whatever the human cost, then, it was hoped, the long-term effects on American political culture might be significant. There would be no place for “wimps” in the political system, no room for those who toy with treaties and negotiations, political settlements, international law, or other such tommyrot; only violent thugs who relish the role of “enforcer,” who delight in sending their military forces and goon squads to torture and kill people who are too weak to fight back, and “hurt them severely” enough so that they will submit to our terms—what is called “conservatism,” in modem political jargon.

Just how firmly the culture of terrorism has been established we shall see, as the Reaganites attempt to consummate their project and other elements within the narrow elite consensus take up the cause, in their own ways, adapting policies to unchanging goals that are deeply rooted in our institutions, our historical practice, and our cultural climate.