3

The Problems of Clandestine Terrorism

Four important features of domestic U.S. society relevant to the issues we are considering are: (1) the effective exclusion of the majority of the population from meaningful participation in the political system; (2) the subordination of the intellectual establishment to the system of state-private power; (3) the limits on the capacity of the state to control its citizens by force; (4) the substantial improvement in the moral and intellectual level of the general population resulting from the mass popular movements of the 1960s and the 1970s.1 The interplay of these factors has complex effects.

Consider the attack against Nicaragua by the U.S.-organized contra armies. The public generally opposes aid to the contras, just as it opposed virtually every major program of the Reagan administration. But central policy issues are largely excluded from the corporate media and barely arise in the political system, one reason why voting continues to decline, to barely 37% in the November 1986 elections.

Nevertheless, popular dissidence remains significant and cannot be controlled by force. Congress, which is somewhat responsive to the public mood, raised a number of barriers to direct U.S. aggression against Nicaragua. This compelled the Reagan administration to devise a complex array of covert means to maintain its mercenary army attacking Nicaragua. Arms were sent to the contras through a shadowy network of CIA subsidiaries and “private” organizations controlled by U.S. ex-generals in close coordination with the White House.2 Notorious international terrorists were enlisted in the cause, for example, Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA-trained Cuban exile sprung from a Venezuelan prison where he was charged with planning the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner with 73 civilians killed, then taken to El Salvador to help organize the contra supply network from the U.S.-controlled Ilopango Air Base.3 The Reagan administration took over the World Anti-Communist League, a collection of Nazis who had been recruited by the U.S. as part of its global campaign against the anti-fascist resistance in the immediate post-World War II period, fanatic anti-Semites, death squad assassins, torturers and killers from around the world, backed by U.S. client states such as South Korea and Taiwan. This organization was converted into an instrument of international terrorism from Mozambique to Nicaragua.4 Profits from U.S. arms sales to Iran via Israel with Saudi Arabian funding, undertaken for entirely different purposes to which we return, were diverted to the contras through Swiss banks, along with tens of millions of dollars from long-term clients such as Taiwan and Saudi Arabia, and targets of opportunity such as the Sultan of Brunei. In what the Far Eastern Economic Review describes as a particularly “remarkable case of arms diplomacy,” the U.S. succeeded in arranging a cooperative effort of China and Taiwan “to help the anti-Communist Nicaraguan resistance [sic],” in a November 1984 deal arranged by Oliver North whereby China shipped arms to the contras through Canadian arms dealers and Portugal, funded by Taiwan.5 The level of support developed through these state-private networks was so large that when $10 million solicited by the State Department from the Sultan was misplaced, the loss was not even noticed. Such machinations provided the contra armies with an air force and military equipment in violation of explicit congressional legislation and U.S. laws going back to the 18th century Neutrality Act, enabling them to maintain some forces within Nicaragua and to continue the terrorist activities that are generally ignored by the U.S. media and dismissed by apologists as “Sandinista atrocity allegations.”6

In such ways, the Reagan administration constructed an international terrorist network of impressive sophistication, without parallel in history to my knowledge, and used it for a variety of purposes in conformity with the Reagan Doctrine, as already discussed.

Some eyebrows were raised when it was disclosed, after the public phase of the Iran-contra hearings concluded, that “Senior Reagan administration officials approved a plan in early 1984,” with the agreement of Secretary of State George Shultz (as a CIA cable indicated), to enlist South Africa too in contra support operations, and that Edén Pastora’s forces in the south received 200,000 pounds of equipment from South Africa, so the CIA reported in February 1985. But after what Duane Clarridge, the CIA official in charge of the agency’s covert support for the contras, called the “hullabaloo” over the CIA mining of the harbors, there were “some second thoughts around town as to the wisdom” of involving South Africa (John McMahon, CIA deputy director, in an April 1984 cable), and the plan was shelved. As the Times puts it, the administration “explicitly ruled out any countries with human rights problems or those dependent on American aid”; the State Department solicited aid only “from countries that had good human rights records,” such as “South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore,” also Taiwan, China, Israel, all with “good human rights records” by Times standards and “not dependent on American aid.”7

It is important to bear in mind that the reliance on clandestine terrorism and proxy forces was undertaken to evade public opinion and its weak reflection in congressional legislation. Clandestine operations are not a secret to their victims, or, generally, to foreign powers and other groups, including business interests out to make a buck, foreign states, shady characters of the Manucher Ghorbanifar variety regarded by Oliver North as an Israeli agent as well as a “liar” and a “cheat” while North relied upon his advice as to how to evade congressional legislation, and so on. It is the domestic population which must be protected from knowledge of these operations, because it would not approve them; otherwise, they need not be secret. As we shall see, Congress and the media helped to conceal the operations until the task became virtually impossible, and now seek to limit any significant understanding of them. Such tactics are a natural feature of the “right turn,” given its restricted nature as an elite phenomenon.

It is normal for the state to regard the domestic population as a major enemy, which must be excluded, repressed or controlled to serve elite interests. This contempt for the citizenry and for the democratic processes that to some extent reflect their concerns has been a notable feature of the Reagan administration, revealed with some clarity in the congressional hearings despite their narrow focus and evasion of such matters. An intriguing case arose when the questioning of Col. North by Rep. Jack Brooks touched upon his plan to suspend the Constitution and impose martial law in the event of “national crises” such as “violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.” In this event, control of the United States was to be turned over to the national crisis-management unit FEMA, directed by Louis Guiffrida. He is a close associate of Reagan and Edwin Meese who, while at the Army War College in 1970, wrote a memorandum recommending internment of all “American Negroes” in “assemble-centers or relocation camps,” in the event of civil disorder. Chairman Daniel Inouye quickly intervened to terminate this line of questioning, and these crucial disclosures were also evaded by the national media, unreported in the New York Times, for example, apart from the few sentences in the aborted congressional questioning.8

The same fear of the domestic population is what lies behind the resort to a clandestine international terrorist network within the framework of the Reagan Doctrine. A central principle of a terrorist culture is that these crucial facts must be obscured, and indeed they are.

In the case of the contra armies, their massive support, supply system, training, access to U.S. intelligence, radio and TV penetration of Nicaragua, and foreign sanctuaries, are far beyond anything available to authentic guerrilla forces9; if a real guerrilla movement such as the one in El Salvador had a fraction of the support lavished on the contras, it would have quickly become a major military force and the U.S.-imposed regime would have long ago collapsed. Nevertheless, the CIA-directed proxy army proved unable to move beyond random terrorism, so that the CIA was once again compelled—as when it carried out the mining of harbors and attacks on oil installations—to employ its own commando groups, now parachuted into Nicaragua to conduct sabotage missions from aircraft piloted by mercenaries (including Belgians, former Rhodesian citizens and Americans) working under CIA contract. These operations are conducted from command centers in El Salvador and Honduras and U.S. ships off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Nicaragua.10 The CIA is “choosing precise military targets for the rebels,” the New York Times reports, providing them “with precise information on dams, bridges, electrical substations, port facilities,” etc.; these “precise military targets” were built by the Army Corps of Engineers and other U.S. agencies that supply maps, blueprints and floor plans to facilitate missions by the commandos of the foreign power attacking Nicaragua.11

As the Spring Offensive of the refurbished proxy army began, its forces were directed by their U.S. controllers to “[go] after soft targets. . . not [try] to duke it out with the Sandinistas directly,” so General John Galvin, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, explained to Congress and the media, adding that with these more sensible tactics, aimed at civilians lacking means of defense against armed terrorist bands, prospects for the contras would improve. Months later, U.S. and Western military observers noted that “the contras have yet to chalk up a major, attention-getting battle success anywhere in Nicaragua . . . [T]he offensive has not been able to get past Sandinista defenses to move down from the mountains to populous towns, let alone cities, or to strike critical objectives. ‘They’re still going after small, soft targets’ like farmers’ cooperatives, the U.S. military analyst says.”12

Under the Reagan doctrine, the United States has created something new in the annals of international terrorism: a lavishly equipped army organized not for combat but for terror, maintained in the field through an extensive supply system provided and protected by the superpower sponsor, directed to attacking “small, soft targets,” to bleeding the victim, which is far too weak to maintain a viable society, let alone persist in social reform, in the face of such a superpower assault. This achievement stands alongside the creation of a terrorist army dedicated to suppressing the population by massive violence in El Salvador, and support for a similar force, in part through the medium of mercenary states, in Guatemala. The program has largely been a success in its basic aims, not very surprisingly, given the balance of force. And there is every reason to expect it to continue, in one or another form, whatever agreements are written down on paper, just as there is little doubt that it will be criticized by responsible opinion only for occasional failings in the pursuit of a noble cause that reveals the benevolence of our intentions.

We should also not overlook the fact that the U.S. strategic weapons system and its intervention forces have constantly been used in the war against Nicaragua. The former serves its traditional function of “deterrence”: namely, providing a “nuclear umbrella” to deter any interference with U.S. policies of subversion, aggression and international terrorism—the primary meaning of “deterrence,” dismissing here familiar Orwellisms.13 The threat of overwhelming U.S. force is a crucial factor in maintaining the proxy army attacking Nicaragua. As agreed on all sides, this military force does not remotely resemble guerrillas in any meaningful sense of the term. It has never attempted to formulate a political program or to construct a substantial popular base, even in areas where the government is highly unpopular. The civilian front constructed by the United States to soften the terrorist image for domestic purposes has also lacked the interest or competence to attempt even perfunctory moves in this direction. The U.S.-controlled troops can survive in the field only with an extensive supply system, including daily air drops by mid-1987, an elaborate intelligence apparatus also provided by the foreign master, and armaments beyond the dreams of authentic guerrillas. We return to details, but again, the essential facts are not in doubt. It is therefore absolutely necessary to ensure that Nicaragua not be permitted to obtain the means to defend its territory from hostile penetration by a U.S. air supply operation, with an air force of its own, adequate anti-aircraft systems, and so on. That Nicaragua must remain defenseless is accepted across the U.S. political spectrum. Such liberal doves as Senators Paul Tsongas and Christopher Dodd agree that Nicaragua must not be permitted to defend its national territory; Tsongas went so far as to assert that the U.S. would have to bomb Nicaragua should it obtain jet planes, because “they’re also capable against the United States,” a remark too outlandish to merit comment, except insofar as it illuminates the hysterical intellectual climate in a terrorist superpower.14 The threat of overwhelming U.S. violence in reserve serves to guarantee that U.S. directives in this regard will not be infringed, a crucial contribution to the survival of the mercenary forces attacking Nicaragua.

U.S. conventional forces are more directly engaged in Central America, not only in such operations as coordinating air strikes in El Salvador but also in the U.S. attack against Nicaragua. The regular maneuvers in Honduras have the dual purpose of creating a U.S. military base in defiance of congressional directives, and compelling Nicaragua to maintain a permanent state of mobilization against the regular threat of invasion. The deployment of 50,000 U.S. forces in maneuvers in May 1987 served a still more specific function. It was a crucial part of the Spring Offensive of the contra armies; the U.S. maneuvers were designed to draw the Nicaraguan army away from population defense so that the terrorist army could prove to Congress that it could achieve sufficient success in its attacks against “soft targets” so as to merit continued support.

When a U.S. ally is forced to mobilize by threatening actions, we regard this threat as tantamount to aggression, justifying a pre-emptive military strike in self-defense. When Israel was compelled to mobilize in late May 1967 as Arab armies were deployed in threatening positions, U.S. and Western opinion generally regarded this as intolerable—how can Israel be expected to sustain mobilization for more than a few days?—so that Israel’s attack was therefore justified in self-defense. Israel was not an impoverished country under attack by a terrorist superpower, but when U.S. military threat compels Nicaragua to maintain permanent mobilization, and to remove its forces from defense of the civilian population so as to clear the way for U.S.-organized terrorists, there is barely a critical word in the media (or in the West rather generally)—except, of course, condemnation of Nicaragua for maintaining defensive military forces, and particularly, for obtaining Soviet arms after the Western allies have refused, under U.S. pressure, to provide them with means to withstand the U.S. terrorist assault, obviously the ultimate proof that they are mere Soviet clients, barely deserving to be called Nicaraguans, a major threat to our security. Putting aside the moral cowardice, the reaction is understandable within a terrorist culture, where it is, furthermore, a crucial obligation to feign ignorance of these obvious facts, systematically suppressed in the media and journals of opinion.

Although the toll of direct murder has been less satisfactory in Nicaragua than in El Salvador and Guatemala, it is a grand success of the Reagan Doctrine, and is no doubt celebrated as such, when thousands of children again die from epidemics that had been eradicated by the early reforms of the Sandinistas. These have been reversed, much to the relief of Washington, along with achievements in literacy and economic development, as a result of U.S.-organized terrorism aimed at “soft targets” accompanied with an embargo and pressures on allies and international lending institutions, and the constant threat of invasion. We read an occasional report that “in Nicaragua’s remote countryside,” the health care programs that had “dramatically lowered” infant mortality and preventable disease are deteriorating, now underfunded because the government has been forced to “put more of their meager resources into the war effort” and because the U.S. proxy forces have attacked such “soft targets” as health programs and schools, destroying over 60 health centers and killing or kidnapping large numbers of medical workers. In one village, 150 children died of measles because contras prevented government health workers, regular assassination targets, from reaching them; and tuberculosis and other diseases are again reaching epidemic proportions, while hospitals and health centers lack medicine and equipment and malnutrition is beginning to rise and might even return to its earlier levels if U.S. efforts succeed. Infant mortality, cut in half by Sandinista health reforms, is on the rise, and hospitals that had previously served only the richest 2% of the population but were opened without cost for the general public under the Sandinistas are now unable to function because of the “increasing demand for care” and the lack of supplies, thanks to the U.S. attack and embargo. Similarly, while the number of teachers has almost tripled, supplies are close to nonexistent. “The Contras Have Learned to Hit Where It Hurts,” a headline in the Washington Post reads, with a report on how the contra army, “reportedly in high spirits and outfitted by the CIA,” succeeded in burning down “a church-sponsored health clinic that had been the pride of the community” in the isolated village of Tapalse, proudly reported by the major contra military group (FDN) as “one of its ‘most important operations’.”15

These are among the consequences of the dedication of the United States to reducing Nicaragua to the zero grade of life. In assessing the crimes of Pol Pot, we rightly count not only those killed outright, but also the victims of disease, malnutrition, and harsh conditions of labor. Those capable of escaping the indoctrination system may recall that the chorus of protest over Khmer Rouge “genocide” or “autogenocide” reached its peak of outrage in early 1977, at a time when State Department intelligence—the only source with substantial information— estimated the toll at “tens if not hundreds of thousands” from all causes, primarily “disease, malnutrition or other factors” rather than outright killing—an estimate that stands up rather well in the light of subsequent scholarship.16 But respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if accurately conducted on a global scale—might perhaps be a proper task in the United States. At the same level of integrity, disciplined Soviet intellectuals are horrified over real or alleged American crimes, but perceive their own only as benevolent intent gone awry, or errors of an earlier day, now overcome; the comparison is inexact and unfair, since Soviet intellectuals can plead fear as an excuse for their services to state violence.

In the real world, the people of Nicaragua must be punished for the criminal effort of the Sandinista government to divert resources to the poor majority. This crime explains “the firm belief” of the Reagan administration that “the Sandinistas must be overthrown or, at least, theirs must become a revolution of misery, a frightful object lesson to the people of the region,”17 who must be deterred from similar heresies. We may then observe their “miseries” with undisguised pleasure, congratulating ourselves in the New York Times that “America’s pugnacity” has compelled them to “keep their miseries to themselves.”18

Much the same thinking lay behind the U.S. resort to large-scale terror against the rural population of South Vietnam. As Kennedy-Johnson adviser General Maxwell Taylor explained to Congress, “We intend to show that the ‘war of liberation’. . . is costly, dangerous and doomed to failure,”19 as is any attempt by suffering people to modify the rules of the international order maintained by its powerful beneficiaries, Winston Churchill’s “rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations” who are to run the world by virtue of this status. The same reasons explain why this commitment of the Reagan administration represents an elite consensus, and why the plain and simple truth of the matter is barely expressible within the cultural mainstream.

It may also be recalled that the previous state of grim suffering and death in Nicaragua, to which we must again reduce them, elicited scarcely a flicker of interest among the educated classes in the United States, just as the perpetuation of these circumstances in Honduras and elsewhere evokes no concern today. Rather, it was the effort to overcome the grim consequences of a century of U.S. dominance that aroused horror and indignation (concealed in the usual “anti-Communist” disguise), along with a dedicated commitment to restore Nicaragua to the “Central American mode,” in the approving words of the editors of the Washington Post, to which we return.

Terrorist attacks on “soft targets” such as health clinics and schools serve obvious purposes. The perceived threat of the Sandinistas was that despite their meager resources and the horrifying conditions left by the final phase of the U.S.-backed Somoza terror, they might be able to introduce the kinds of reforms that would have appeal both in neighboring countries, and in regions of Nicaragua where the Somoza regime maintained a degree of popular support within the peasant society and there was antagonism to Sandinista measures, sometimes conducted foolishly and even brutally, particularly in the early period. But the fear of successful reform can be overcome by destroying health services, schools and cooperative farms. It is, therefore, only rational to direct the proxy army to attack such “soft targets,” and in the generally remote areas where the terrorist forces can penetrate, these policies have had some success in their aims, so the occasional press reports indicate. Thus in Jinotega province near the Honduran border, Peter Ford reports, contras have succeeded in terrorizing civilians by ambushing trucks with many civilian casualties, killing many doctors, health workers and teachers, forcing the government to close newly opened schools and clinics, and repeatedly burning down houses, educational facilities, cooperative stores, community kitchens and so on, causing such random destruction that cooperative “members barely manage to feed themselves, let alone make a profit from their harvests.” The contra leaders also deliver what counts as a “political speech” by U.S. standards: namely, a warning to the cooperative members that if they rebuild their community “100 times, they would destroy it 100 times,” so a peasant woman reports.20 The expectation is that these tactics will abort measures of reform and national integration, fuel discontent, and, ultimately, bring the population to understand that only by a return to “the Central American mode” established by the United States will the terror come to an end.

Partisans of U.S. terror have constructed a special vocabulary to conceal their satisfaction with the achievements of the Reagan Doctrine despite its possible “flaws.” Thus, New Republic editor Morton Kondracke warns us that failure to stay the course may “jeopardize all that has been achieved for democracy in recent years” in Central America.21 Meanwhile, at the left-liberal extreme of the expressible spectrum, Charles Lane explains in the same journal, apparently without irony, that the Reagan Doctrine sought “a low-cost way to reconcile America’s noble wish for democratic development in the Third World with its muscular desire to overcome the Vietnam syndrome.” But while the Doctrine may have succeeded in El Salvador, he continues, it is threatened by American impatience in Nicaragua, where “the United States finds itself faced with a society and a culture that can’t be made democratic as quickly as it would like” by “armed rebellion”—incidentally, supported by such stellar democracies as Argentina under the rule of the neo-Nazi generals, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, and organized at home by such enthusiasts of democratic processes as William Casey, Edwin Meese, John Poindexter, and the rest of the cabal. Critics of the Reagan Doctrine are concerned that the Reagan administration’s “active promotion of democracy” may be too “aggressive” (John Rielly), that our efforts “to force the Sandinista revolution into the American democratic mold” may not be worth “the risk” (John Oakes), and that Nicaragua may be “beyond the reach of our good intentions” (Jefferson Morley).22 Lane, Oakes and Morley are at the outer limits of dissent within mainstream journalism. Beyond this spectrum of respectable opinion, we have only those whom McGeorge Bundy once described as “wild men in the wings,” referring to people who dared to question the “first team” that was in charge of our earlier crusade for democracy in Vietnam.23

Faith in our “good intentions” remains unimpaired by the historical record in Central America and the Caribbean, not to speak of Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere; and properly so, given the irrelevance of the historical and documentary record in a terrorist culture, which carefully avoids any institutional critique and can always appeal to the doctrine of “change of course” if nothing else avails. U.S. sponsorship in Central America of some of the most horrendous atrocities of recent years elicits only the thought that some problems there may be “beyond the reach of our good intentions.” The reaction was similar when popular opposition to brutal dictatorship and state terror in South Korea, long supported by the United States, reached a level difficult to ignore by 1987; the resulting outburst of anti-Americanism evoked the reflection that “imposing American morality on other countries’ political systems is a ticklish business,” nothing more.24

The doctrine of “good intentions” is beyond challenge, even beyond awareness—at least at home. Others manage a clearer view, even among our allies. As the U.S. was exploiting Britain’s travail to take over its traditional domains during World War II, the British foreign services were able to penetrate the ideological mask. In their wartime records, we read that “American imperialism is in the forefront in the conduct of affairs in the Far East,” as elsewhere, “attempting to elbow us out.” The High Commissioners of the British Dominions warned of “the economic imperialism of American business interests, which is quite active under the cloak of a benevolent and avuncular internationalism.” As for the fabled “benevolence” of the United States, a staple of Western ideological systems, the Minister of State at the British Foreign Office, Richard Law, commented to his Cabinet colleagues that Americans believe “that the United States stands for something in the world— something of which the world has need, something which the world is going to like, something, in the final analysis, which the world is going to take, whether it likes it or not”25—a good succinct summary of U.S. foreign policy and its conventional disguise.

Such insights are commonly achieved by the victims: the British displaced by U.S. “economic imperialism”; the peasants subjected to somewhat more rigorous measures of discipline in Central America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere; or the European working classes who were called upon to bear the costs of the reconstruction of capitalism in the interests of U.S. investors and their local associates in the early postwar period. It is the task of the educated classes to conceal these facts as they discourse about the nobility of the “American purpose” and other familiar doctrines, a task that they have conducted with considerable success, and in the United States, with notable uniformity and devotion.

To maintain discipline abroad often proves a harder task. From early on, the Reagan administration has elicited criticism and serious concern, even in conservative circles, for heightening world tension and “debasing the language of international intercourse with feverish rhetoric,” creating a “chasm” between “current American perceptions of the world and the world’s perception of America” (David Watt, Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London). While U.S. terrorism in Nicaragua was still “clandestine”—meaning well-known, but kept under cover—Canada’s leading newspaper, generally restrained and pro-U.S., condemned the Reagan administration for acts of “madness” in organizing a “band of cutthroats” to attack Nicaragua under the direction of its “bizarre cowboy leader” in Washington. As Washington sought to undermine the Central American accords of August 1987, the centrist British press virtually pleaded with President Reagan to “come to terms with reality in Central America” and allow the peace plan to proceed instead of “financing a murderous and incompetent band of Contra mercenaries” in his “obsession with the overthrow of the elected government of Nicaragua,” a crusade that “has brought dishonour to him and his Administration”:

It also flouts rulings by the International Court of Justice, and parallels the so-called Soviet ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ as applied in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe. Not least, it has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women and children and million of pounds’ worth of destruction in an already wretchedly poor area of the world.

For all Washington’s propaganda efforts, the US is seen internationally as the loser and the Sandinistas as one of the more genuinely popular regimes in Central America. Nicaragua is so weakly aligned to the Soviet Union that Mr Gorbachev has cut off its oil supplies. Meanwhile, the country that proclaims itself the world’s greatest democracy aligns itself with regimes, such as those in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which are little more than façades for military rule. . . The symbol of the Republican Party has, of course, always been that of an elephant. It is dismaying to watch it behaving true to form with a gnat.26

Such perceptions would be difficult to find in the domestic counterparts of these national journals, though in a few U.S. client states there is a sympathetic popular response to Reaganite “madness.”27

While exercises of international terrorism cause problems among the allies, there are compensations as well. The state managers are naturally not unaware of the image they present abroad, and they have sought to exploit it for the furtherance of their terrorist operations. A few weeks after its bombing of Libya in April 1986, the Reagan administration sought to line up the Western powers in its anti-Libyan crusade. To this end, it circulated a position paper at the Tokyo summit in May warning of “the need to do something so that the crazy Americans won’t take matters into their own hands again.” The strategy was successful, and Reagan’s aides were quite clear about the reasons:

“We’ve got the madman factor going for us,” said one U.S. official, referring not to Kaddafi but to Reagan. “You know, ‘Keep me from killing again’.”28

Returning to terrorist operations closer to home, the media and other commentators assure us that the Sandinistas merely exploit the pretense that they are under attack and threatened by invasion to justify repression and to explain away the economic catastrophe that has been caused by their incompetence and evil nature. It is unnecessary to provide any factual basis or reasoned argument for these claims, since they are required by the propaganda system and are therefore true by definition. We may therefore cheerfully ignore the record of repression of other states in situations of conflict—clearly El Salvador must be avoided because the wrong conclusions will be too obvious, but we must also suppress the record of such states as Israel or the United States itself, in far less onerous circumstances.29

The well-behaved commentator must also dismiss the facts about economic performance: for example, the 1983 conclusion of the Inter-American Development Bank, now barred from offering loans to Nicaragua by U.S. pressure, that “Nicaragua has made noteworthy progress in the social sector, which is laying a solid foundation for long-term socio-economic development,” a conclusion supported by the charitable development agency Oxfam and numerous others who are not properly disciplined; and the fact that Nicaragua’s net increase in Gross Domestic Product “for 1980-1985 was 4.4 percent, almost double the rate of increase of the Latin American GDP as a whole” and well beyond that of any other country in Latin America. We must ignore or disparage the welfare programs, and the substantial increase in capital investment in agriculture, which threatened to allow Nicaragua to become self-sufficient in food while during the same years (early 80s), capital investment in agriculture dropped elsewhere in Central America, by 57% in Guatemala and 73% in Costa Rica. It would also be inappropriate to consider the figures on export production, increasing by over 11% in Nicaragua from 1979 through 1985 (while the value of these exports declined by almost 25% because of deterioration in terms of trade), in contrast to a 19% decline elsewhere in Central America. We must ignore the general economic crisis throughout Latin America, particularly severe in Central America, or the conclusion of Enrique Bolaños, chairman of the Council of Private Enterprise in Nicaragua and a leading opponent of the Sandinistas (hence a leading democrat in the U.S.), who attributes the economic crisis in Nicaragua to the war (60%), the international economic crisis (10%), the contraction of the Central American Common Market (10%), and decapitalization by the business sector and government errors (20%).30

It is also important to forget that the unacceptable achievements after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Somoza regime took place against the background of the devastation it had left, and the final robbery of what remained, leaving the country in such a state that an October 1980 World Bank mission estimated that “per capita income levels of 1977 will not be attained, in the best of circumstances, until the late 1980s.”31 The actual circumstances were the escalating U.S. war against Nicaragua, requiring mobilization of population and resources at a level that would be unbearable even in a wealthy and well-functioning economy.

All other factors notwithstanding, the problems in Nicaragua must be the responsibility of the official enemy, and nothing more need be said to prove the point. The problems in neighboring countries enjoying bountiful U.S. aid rarely reach the threshold of attention and elicit no impassioned condemnation.

To maintain strict discipline on these matters is no easy task, one of the ancillary ideological problems of clandestine terrorism. But it must be done, and one will find few departures from the doctrinal requirements of the terrorist state.

Closer examination of the charges of Sandinista Marxist-Leninist dogmatism and its catastrophic effects helps illuminate the culture of terrorism from another standpoint. The Wall St. Journal headlines an article by Clifford Krauss: “Nicaragua is Getting Little Foreign Aid in Righting Economic Mess it Created.”32 Krauss concedes that the war may have “strained” the government budget, but dismisses the effects of the trade embargo and other U.S. measures, though these have plainly been severe in blocking natural markets and sources of supply, even spare parts, and forcing Nicaragua to rely on the Soviet Union in accordance with Reagan administration imperatives.33 The real problem, he insists, is the “counterproductive government pricing policies,” which lead to such “market absurdities” as an artificially low price for bananas, part of the effort to ensure that the urban poor will have access to food. Assume the criticism to be valid. One will search in vain, however, for derisive articles on the pricing policies based on market realities in U.S. domains, for example, Honduras, which exports crops while much of the population literally starves to death. These are simply the natural workings of the market, meriting only approbation for the rational policies that happen to benefit U.S. corporations and their local associates, if not the Honduran peasant.

Condemnation of the Sandinistas for the economic failures resulting from “Marxist-Leninist dogmatism” must also refrain from any comparison with the world’s richest and most powerful state, where the brilliant economic management of the Reaganites, largely reflecting an elite consensus, is reviewed in an October 1986 report of the U.S. Department of Commerce that describes how, “in a few short years, a wealthy creditor nation has become the number one debtor” as “the United States has largely lost its ability to compete successfully in international trade.”34 “The United States required nearly 70 years to attain a creditor position of $150 billion, reached in 1982. . . As of now, the debtor status is about $250 billion. Some analysts project that the debtor position could approach or exceed $800 billion by 1990.” That would constitute a shift of close to a trillion dollars within a decade in the relations of the world-dominant power to its rivals, a remarkable and unprecedented phenomenon in world affairs. The International Monetary Fund warns that the main danger to the world economy “lies in the huge US budget and trade deficits,” which it considers “unsustainable” for the world’s economy.35 Plainly these achievements, only a part of the dismal Reaganite heritage, offer us a proper platform for contemptuous denunciation of the failings of the Sandinistas, in their far more favorable circumstances.

In extenuation of the Reaganite economic managers, one might argue that they have, after all, been dedicated to reducing the gap, or chasm, in living standards that separates the United States from the suffering people of the Third World. Thus we read that “Third world conditions have reached the Middle West,” where “We’re starting to see goiters and abscessed baby teeth in farm children, which indicates they are not getting adequate nutrition,” “Hunger and malnutrition are a new phenomenon among Kansas farm families, experts say,” a phenomenon of the 1980s, though not a new phenomenon among the urban power or elsewhere, conditions that have notably worsened during the Reagan years. “Ironically, experts explain, farmers today are suffering more than in the Great Depression” because of “modern practices aimed at increasing efficiency,” so that farmers buy their food at supermarkets while producing corn, sorghum and wheat for sale.36

We might also take note of another and rather more serious debt crisis, namely, in the Third World. Since 1981, Third World countries have become net capital exporters as debt servicing exceeds new borrowing—to which we must add profit repatriations by transnational corporations and massive capital flight, which in Latin America approaches the scale of the debt itself. With non-oil commodity prices declining and the capital outflow rapidly increasing, there is “a historically unprecedented transfer of resources from the poor to the rich countries,” a recent analysis observes.37 This transfer of resources with the predictable human consequences is not regarded by elite opinion as a problem, though inability to pay the banks is a different matter.

The covert activities of the Reagan administration in violation of public opinion and congressional dictates were well-known all along. “Journalists in Central America knew long ago that somebody was flying supplies to the Contras inside Nicaragua,” the right-wing correspondent of the London Spectator pointed out after the “scandals” had erupted.38 “Captain Ricardo Wheelock, the head of the Sandinista military intelligence, was even able to give us fairly precise details of these flights, but nobody bothered to chase the story until Eugene Hasenfus was shot down and captured” in October 1986. Similarly, reporters failed to follow many leads indicating that “Oliver North was running the Contra operation from his office at the National Security Council.” North’s role was of course known,39 and suppressed. Over a year before the scandals broke, the New York Times reported that the contras were “receiving direct military advice from White House officials” in an operation run by a military officer on the National Security Council staff who “briefs President Reagan,” namely Oliver North, whose name they suppressed for fear of endangering his life, according to the editors. Shortly after, Reagan held a press conference in which the Washington press corps, which has concocted for itself a self-congratulatory image of aggressiveness that is generally laughable, raised 26 questions on 15 different subjects, asking nothing about these reports,40 which were of no interest because the operations only endanger the lives of people who deserve to suffer for their sins.

It was also apparent that the contras were receiving arms from U.S. clients such as El Salvador, Honduras, and Israel, meaning that in effect they were receiving arms from the United States in violation of congressional directives.41 Well before the “scandals” had erupted, CIA involvement in contra aid in violation of congressional restrictions was revealed to be at a level that “may astound even the most jaded observer,” Congressman Sam Gejdenson commented, including funding of military operations and bribing of Honduran and Costa Rican officials.42 The disclosures attracted little notice.

In general, the facts were known, but suppressible. The same was true of the disclosures concerning Iran, to which we return. In fact, the only really novel insight produced in the 1986-87 exposures is that these two clandestine operations were linked, although the scale and sophistication of the international terrorist network constructed during the Reagan years was not known in detail and is of no little interest. The same was true of the “secret wars” in Laos and Cambodia, known to the media throughout, but suppressible.43

Furthermore, it was entirely obvious, even without direct information, that a lawless administration would simply find other ways to pursue its goals if Congress were to bar direct takeover of the war. This is surely understood by the media and Congress as well as it is by the terrorist commanders supported under the Reagan Doctrine, for example, Jonas Savimbi, who remarked to journalists in 1982 that “A great country like the U.S. has other channels . . . The Clark Amendment [barring aid to Savimbi’s UNITA] means nothing.”44 Those unable to draw the conclusion for themselves could turn to Reagan administration sources for enlightenment. Thus in a front-page story of March 9, 1986, the Miami Herald outlined Reagan’s request to Congress for aid to the contra armies, quoting its crucial paragraph authorizing the CIA and any other “department or agency in the executive branch” to take over the war effort. “Officials said that if Congress rejects the package, then Reagan may feel free to use other measures to contain Nicaragua”45—the latter phrase serving as one of the euphemisms for international terrorism. When the “scandals” could no longer be suppressed, the press quoted officials who supervised the secret war as saying that “legality was viewed as an obstacle that had to be gotten around. That was the spirit of the program,” then commenting that “the real wonder is that Congress, the Reagan administration and the public took so long to become concerned about the questionable activities and possible violations of law in contra funding that have been evident for several years.”46 A more pertinent question, unasked, is why it took the press so long to report what it had long known. There were numerous other indications of the obvious, but it was more convenient to disregard them, in the usual style of subordination to power.

The supply flights to the contras and other evidence ignored by the media were, of course, known to U.S. intelligence, hence to State Department intelligence; even if the flights had not been arranged by U.S. agencies, it is difficult to imagine that U.S. intelligence is so incompetent that it was unable to detect flights from U.S.-supervised military air bases in El Salvador and Honduras to Nicaragua, which is probably under more intense aerial surveillance than any other place in the world, or to learn what was familiar fare to journalists in Managua. All of this was therefore surely known to Elliott Abrams and George Shultz.47 Their professions of ignorance and the perfunctory inquiry into these matters at the Iran-contra hearings merit no comment, nor need we tarry over “the refreshingly blunt candor of Secretary of State George Shultz, battling for his honor” at the hearings, which so impressed Congress and the media.48

But it proved impossible to maintain secrecy after the downing of the contra supply plane in Nicaragua and the revelation by a Beirut journal and by the Iranians of the visit to Teheran by former national security adviser Robert McFarlane. The partial unravelling of the complex web of deceit from October 1986 became a severe embarrassment to the terrorist commanders in Washington, who were forced to pretend that they knew nothing of the programs carried out under their general orders. These exposures might serve to limit their capacity to conduct the programs of international terrorism to which they are dedicated, at least temporarily. The exposures also slightly widened the opportunities for honest journalists to publish some of what they knew, not only with regard to Central America, much as happened during the Watergate period before the door was again slammed shut.