The need for public and Congressional support is a unique element to the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate that engendered it. While the rest of the Powell Doctrine, and its intellectual climate, represents the military proactively learning and asserting the lessons of Vietnam to civilian policy makers, the stress on the need for public support is largely a reactive response on behalf of the military towards changes in American society, changes in the role that Congress saw for itself in the making of foreign policy, and changes in the law. This is not to say that public support was unimportant in all wars prior to Vietnam, rather it is to say that public support became harder to achieve in the post-Vietnam era and also that public support became that much harder to maintain over the long run. The other important distinction to draw between the pre and post-Vietnam eras is that the military tended to see public support for military action as something which must exist a priori, rather than something which could be mobilized after the President had already made the decision to commit US troops abroad. The following quotation is taken from a speech Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had delivered to the National Press Club in November 1984: “before the United States commits combat forces abroad, the US Government should have some reasonable assurance of the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress.”1
In this chapter, we are talking solely about the intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine as the events in this chapter take place well before the publication of either the 1992 Foreign Affairs article or Powell’s term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In this chapter we will look at the lessons Congress and the American public took from Vietnam and how that led to a change in attitudes towards military intervention in particular in the developing world. We will also see how during the Nixon Administration and beyond, Congress became more assertive about its role in the making of foreign policy and passed measures which fundamentally changed its role in the decision making process leading up to the deployment of US forces for combat overseas.
The case study this chapter will use will be an examination of US policy towards Nicaragua between 1979 and 1984. The selection of this case study allows us to look at the different approaches of two Administrations of different parties and ideological points of view. Also, it allows us to look at the differences between dealing with an insurgency and trying to overthrow the government that resulted from this insurgency.
Before moving on to look at the lessons of Vietnam, we need, for purposes of comparison, to look at how Congress saw its role in formulating foreign policy before Vietnam.
The early Cold War saw a shift in the balance of power between the Presidency and Congress in the making of foreign policy. With the US now a global military power for the first time, and with the advent of nuclear weapons making speed of decision making vital, the important foreign policy decision making tended to drift away from Congress where debate and parliamentary procedure could hold up the decision making process, towards the executive where a small group of Presidential advisors could make decisions quickly. It was also felt that the Executive had better access to information than Congress. This was not a process which was forced down Congress’ throat, but a process which Congress largely accepted as necessary and sensible. Senator Tom Connally (D-Texas) explaining his support of President Truman’s decision to send troops into Korea without consulting Congress said:
If a burglar breaks into your house, you can shoot him without going down to the police station and getting permission. You might run into a long debate by Congress, which would tie your hands completely. You have the right to do so as Commander-in-Chief and under the UN Charter.2
This quotation very aptly demonstrates the idea that the Cold War had created a state of permanent national “emergency,” in which the President could justifiably act outside of the normal constraints of everyday politics and legislative procedure. This sense that, in the early 1950s, senior policymakers in the United States saw themselves as being locked in a life and death struggle with the forces of Totalitarian Soviet Communism was vividly expressed in the now famous policy paper blandly titled NSC-68:
The design [referring to Soviet plans and intentions as perceived by the authors of NSC-68], therefore, calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.3
These fears were only heightened by the recent Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons:
The Kremlin’s possession of atomic weapons puts new power behind its design, and Increases the jeopardy to our system. It adds new strains to the uneasy equilibrium without order which exists in the world and raises new doubts in men’s minds whether the world will long tolerate this tension without moving toward some kind of order, on somebody’s terms.4
Despite this sense that the United States was locked in a life or death struggle with the Soviet Union, successive Presidents were still eager to prove that this new found freedom in the making of foreign policy had a constitutional basis. Presidents from Truman onwards pointed out that the constitution gave the President the title of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and that, under this authority, the President was entitled to send troops anywhere in the world without needing legally to consult Congress5.
Although there was widespread initial support for Truman’s decision to commit troops to Korea, as it became apparent that US forces were not going to achieve a quick victory, Republicans felt increasingly free to attack Truman’s handling of the war safe in the knowledge that they could not be counter attacked because Truman had not consulted them prior to his decision to commit troops6.
Therefore, when situations arose during the 1950s that seemed to require the use of US military force, such as the 1958 crisis in Lebanon or the Quemoy-Matsu dispute between China and Taiwan7, Eisenhower used Congressional resolutions as a way of indicating Congressional support for his policies without asking for a formal declaration of war. The novel aspect of these resolutions was that, unlike a declaration of war, these resolutions gave the President the power to act in situations which had not yet arisen. Also, these resolutions were extremely vaguely worded and gave the President wide latitude to interpret what they meant. For example, the Formosa Resolution dealing with the defense of Quemoy and Matsu read:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that the President of the United States be hereby authorized to employ the Armed Forces of the United States as he deems necessary for the specific purpose of securing and protecting Formosa and the Pescadores against armed attack, this authority to include the securing and protection of such related positions and territories of that area now in friendly hands and the taking of such other measures as he judges to be required or appropriate in assuring the defense of Formosa and the Pescadores. This resolution shall expire when the President shall determine that the peace and security of the area is reasonably assured by international conditions created by action of the United Nations or otherwise, and shall so report to the Congress.8
Under this Resolution the President alone decides when it expires, and it is the President alone who decides exactly under what circumstances US forces will be used to implement this resolution. Effectively, these resolutions act as a blanket grant of authority on the part of Congress to the President limited only by geographical area. Senator William Fulbright (D. Arkansas) expressed deep concern about the constitutional propriety of granting such authority to a President outside of wartime:
Shall we strike down the Senate’s rights and duties in the conduct of foreign affairs, as defined by 168 years of constitutional practice? … Shall we say yes to a radical proposal whose adoption would mean that we are abandoning our constitutional systems of checks and balances; that from now on, naked Executive power will rule the highest and most fateful interests of the nation?9
Given the enormous authority Congress was giving to the President, it would be reasonable to expect these Resolutions to be the subject of heated debate and a close vote. However, this was far from being the case. The Formosa Resolution was passed by House vote 409–3 and by the Senate vote 85–3.10 President Johnson used very similar language to the Formosa Resolution when drawing up the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which in addition to Johnson’s power as Commander in Chief, allegedly provided the legal justification for the presence of US forces in Vietnam.
This happy consensus over the roles of the President and Congress in foreign policy making was to be shattered in Vietnam in a debate about the proper balance between Executive and Legislative authority which continues to the present day11.
As America’s involvement in Vietnam deepened and the human and financial costs, mounted, Congress, in particular the Senate, began to regret the casual way in which they had granted Johnson the authority to wage war. This regret extended beyond the end of the war. Many, particularly in the Democratic Party, felt that the time had come for Congress to reassert a more active role in the making of foreign policy. The Congressional elections of 1970, 1972 and 1974, bought into Congress a new generation of politicians who were much less willing than their predecessors to defer to the judgments of the Executive on matter of foreign policy, and were much more reluctant to consider potential American military involvement overseas:
The 1972 elections, and especially the 1974 midterm elections, brought into the Congress scores of Democrats (and some Republicans) opposed to the war, many of whom—like Al Gore, Jr., and Stephen Solarz—had been involved in years past in the antiwar movement … the level of Congressional activism with respect to the war increased yearly … The precedent had been set on December 22, 1970, when the Congress voted to cut off all funds for US operations in Cambodia and Laos.12
Congress not only voted against further funding for operations in Cambodia and Laos, but over the coming years a series of bills was introduced which sought to end the war, or limit its scope. By the time the Paris Peace Accords was signed in 1973, it had become a real fear among the senior members of the Nixon Administration that if no peace treaty were signed, Congress would move to unilaterally end US involvement.13
The most radical piece of legislation that congress passed to limit the freedom of the executive branch in its ability to use military force was the 1973 War Powers Act. The sponsors of this legislation hoped that it would reassert Congress’ traditional power to declare war in a modern context:
It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities.14
The resolution was drafted in such a way as to make it legally impossible for the President to deploy US forces overseas without Congressional approval, and perhaps more importantly, the law required that this approval be ascertained by a process of ongoing consultation between Congress and the President.
Whenever United States Armed Forces are introduced into hostilities or into any situation described in subsection (a) of this section, the President shall, so long as such armed forces continue to be engaged in such hostilities or situation, report to the Congress periodically on the status of such hostilities or situation as well as on the scope and duration of such hostilities or situation, but in no event shall he report to the Congress less often than once every six months.15
The real teeth of the Act comes from the fact that if Congress has not approved the deployment of troops, they will be withdrawn 60 days after the President first reported to Congress that the deployment of troops was necessary. This period can be extended to 90 days if the President deems the situation to be an emergency or if withdrawal after 60 days is not logistically feasible.16
The War Powers Resolution was passed over Richard Nixon’s veto and has never been invoked. Many scholars and policy makers have questioned its constitutional validity.
It should be noted that the constitutionality of the War Powers Act has never directly been put before a court and that, despite the insistence of various Administrations17 that the Act is unconstitutional, it remains on the statute books. Indeed, the threat of the Act being invoked by Congress has meant that in every instance of US forces being sent into combat overseas except Grenada and Panama, which in any case did not last long enough for the Act to be an issue, Presidents have sought Congressional approval and have got it. Whatever the legality of the War Powers Act, the very fact that it passed over President Nixon’s veto is indicative of the fact that, by the early 1970s, Congress had become much more strident in demanding that its voice be heard in matters relating to Foreign Policy and National Security.
The change in Congressional mood was to a certain extent driven by the general disillusionment of the American public with the Vietnam War. Although there had been antiwar protest movements in America long before Vietnam, the Vietnam antiwar movement was different in its size and intensity. Its overall effect on US policy is hard to measure. What makes it so difficult to judge its effectiveness is that the antiwar movement was an enormously broad coalition of groups and interests ranging from the totalitarian left18 through religious pacifism to disillusioned liberals. These groups had massively different criteria for success and whilst the more hardcore, left wing of the antiwar movement tended to alienate mainstream American society, the more liberal element served to legitimize dissent on the issue of the war.19
What can be said with certainty is that as the war dragged on, more and more people became disillusioned with the US presence in Vietnam:
The limited patience of the American people affected all Nixon’s Vietnam strategies from 1969 through 1973. By spring of 1968, a majority of Americans thought that getting involved in Vietnam had been a mistake. They did not call for immediate withdrawal—only a small minority of Americans ever favored that option—but they desired an end to the war and the unprecedented societal dislocation that had come with it.20
The nature of this disillusionment was not uniform. Some people questioned the whole basis of US involvement in the war, whilst others wanted the US to adopt a more aggressive strategy in order to win the war more quickly. Whether hawks or doves, there was one common feature of growing disillusionment with Vietnam which began with the Johnson Administration and reached toxic proportions during the Nixon Administration: people of whatever shade of opinion no longer trusted what they were being told by Government. This breakdown of trust between Citizens and Government was not helped by the Watergate scandal or by the revelations of the CIA’s domestic activity.
This phenomenon has come to be known as the “credibility gap.” We have already seen in chapter two how Lyndon Johnson’s desire that Vietnam not affect his domestic programs led to limitations on the way the war was fought. This same impulse led Johnson and his Administration to consistently overstate how well the war was going. This led to a situation in which a large section of the press no longer believed Government statements on the war which were flatly contradicted by reporters on the ground in Vietnam.
The problem was serious, and went beyond simple matters of personal tastes and preferences. The credibility of the President—and, in effect, of the United States government—was on the line. The battles with the press, George Reedy (President Johnson’s press secretary) noted, became battles with important segments of the public.21
This credibility gap was not simply a problem for Johnson personally, or even his Administration. The nature of the relationship between a President and the press was changing throughout the 1960s. With the advent of television and the improvements in communication technology, information could be relayed much faster. This increasingly meant that television became the dominant source of news for many people. This meant that newspapers and magazines were under increasing pressure to deliver sensational news and deliver it quickly. The upshot of this was that news became much more difficult for Government to manage effectively:
The modern President and the media have a symbiotic relationship. The President carries a publicity train in his wake; he needs a flow of information to his public constituency. Media workers are conduits, sometimes allowing free flow, sometimes selecting, sometimes adding their own gloss. Meanwhile, White House announcements and printouts gush like a torrent.22
Given these enormous changes in the social and political context in which it had to operate, it is not surprising that many within the US Armed Forces came to see the unambiguous support of Congress and the public as being indispensable. The following quotation is taken from an unpublished manuscript of a dissertation undertaken by US military officers undergoing General Staff training.
Take on only commitments that can gain the support of the American people and the Congress. Reasonable assurance of public support is vital to the success of any military commitment—it is the underlining force multiplier in obtaining a military end-state, ‘that being success or failure.’23
When we look at the intellectual climate that informed the Powell Doctrine and, indeed, the intellectual climate that still informs the attitude of the Military to public and Congressional opinion up to the present moment, we can see that the need to both gain and hold public support over the long-term ranks high on the list of priorities. It is also not surprising that, given the state of Congressional opinion and the importance of the media outlined above, that the Military sees the maintenance of public support over the long term as something which is difficult to maintain: “Our impatient domestic population may find it hard to maintain support for a Long War, as the end may not be readily in sight, the objectives may be vaguely defined, and the enemy may be obscure.”24 This is not just a recent observation made in connection with the War on Terror. Harry Summers also makes the point that maintaining public support for military intervention over the long-haul must be considered vital: “They [senior military officers] needed to tell him that it would be an obvious fallacy to commit the Army without first committing the American people.”25 Indeed, General Westmoreland, looking back on Vietnam in retirement, notes the failure to win and maintain public and Congressional support over Vietnam and the corrosive effect it had on the war effort: “By failing to level with the people and failing to impel the Congress to commit itself, the President allowed public opinion to become a leaden liability.”26
What the above discussion shows is that the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate predating it in the late 1970s and early 1980s saw that mobilizing and maintaining public support was a vital constituent of military success, and what the discussion also shows is that this concern over what public opinion will and will not stand continues to be a subject of intense concern within the US Military.
Before moving on to look at how the perceived need to win and maintain public support affected US policy towards Nicaragua, it is worth pausing to examine what we mean by “public opinion,” its nature, its impact, and the role it ought to play in deciding on an appropriate national security policy. We will first look at the profound pessimism surrounding the nature and utility of public opinion expressed by scholars such as Walter Lippman, Don Oberdorfer and John Mueller. We will then move on to look at those scholars who are more optimistic about the consistency, utility and nature of the public’s engagement with national security affairs such as Bruce Jentleson, Stephen Kull and I.M. Destler.
Early scholars of public opinion had a very low opinion both of the public’s comprehension of public policy and the public’s ability to express consistent and logical preferences over a prolonged period of time. Walter Lippman, writing on the subject of public opinion in 1922, expressed the view that, because public opinion was always based on imperfect information, and, particularly in matters of foreign policy, because the general public has no first-hand experience of either foreign lands of warfare, public opinion in Lippman’s mind is largely derived from a series of stereotypes that the public holds, rather than any kind of logical deduction:
Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth’s surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few intimately. Of any public event that has wide effects we see at best only a phase and an aspect. This is as true of the eminent insiders who draft treaties, make laws, and issue orders, as it is of those who have treaties framed for them, laws promulgated to them, orders given at them. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.27
For Lippman, what makes public opinion reached by process outlined above so unstable is that the stereotypes the public bases its opinion on are fed to the public at large through the press. The press being a marketplace means that publications are constantly fighting for market share and survival: “The object of every publisher is, therefore to turn his circulation from a medley of catch-as-catch-can news stand buyers into a devoted band of constant readers.”28 This means that the press have a strong incentive to feed the public the news that the public wants to read about: “The newspaper deals with a multitude of events beyond our experience. But it deals also with some events within our experience. And by its handling of those events we most frequently decide to like it or dislike it.”29 If Lippman noticed this phenomenon among newspaper publishers in the 1920s, Don Oberdorfer, in his account of the Tet Offensive, noticed a similar phenomenon, whereby television network news competed with each other to produce the most sensational and exciting stories:
The Tet story had suspense, high drama and enormous public interest. The United States and its allies were not the inevitable winners in every battle; the Communists had taken the initiative. The plans and purposes of the United States hung in the balance; political and military reputations were at stake; there was an enveloping aura of controversy at home and in the field.30
If Lippman and Oberdorfer are correct and the press, through market forces, is driven toward parochialism or sensationalism, they are hardly the best sources of information on which the public can base ordered, logical policy preferences.
However, if the press is an unhelpful means by which the general public can form policy preferences, there is also the possibility that the public’s underlying biases and stereotypes that Lippman takes for the basis of public opinion may also be prone to alarmingly rapid shifts. John Mueller’s work looks at public support for the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Mueller’s argument is that there is a direct statistical relationship between public support for any of these wars and increases in American casualties. According to Mueller, this relationship is impervious to the existence or non-existence of an anti-war movement or how the public perceives the stakes for the United States. According to Mueller’s argument, the relationship between public support and casualties is an inverse one: as casualties go up, public support goes down:
American public opinion became a key factor in all three wars [Korea, Vietnam and the Second Iraq War], and in each one there has been a simple association: as casualties mount, support decreases. Broad enthusiasm at the outset invariably erodes.31
Also, Mueller is intensely critical of what he sees as the extreme artifice of the whole notion of sampling public opinion:
The interview situation is an odd social experience. The respondent, on his doorstep or in his living room, is barraged with a set of questions on a wide variety of subjects by a stranger … Few people are accustomed to having their every utterance faithfully recorded and many find the experience flattering. And, aware that their views are being preserved for the ages, they do not wish to appear unprepared at that moment. Under these circumstances it is not surprising to find respondents pontificating in a seemingly authoritative, if basically “truthful,” manner on subjects about which they know nothing or to which they have never given any thought whatsoever.32
So, Mueller as an expert statistician and follower of public opinion is essentially supporting Lippman’s argument that public opinion is no more than a snapshot of the stereotypes and biases of whoever is being sampled, and that the problem is less that the general public’s opinion of important policy matters is wrong, but that, on a wide variety of subjects, the general public simply does not have what could be thought of as a considered opinion. The relationship between this observation and Mueller’s observation that support for war is generally inverse to the numbers of casualties suffered and that, initially, Korea, Vietnam and the second Iraq War were met with broad public support, is easy enough to explain. The initial broad public support is generated by an instinctive wish to support the President and the country, the so-called “rally around the flag” effect:
Partisan differences were relatively small at the beginning of the wars [Korea and Vietnam], presumably under the influence of a sort of nonpartisan consensus at a time of national emergency. Differences broadened considerably once the wars were underway, becoming entirely unambiguous after the Chinese intervention in Korea and by the second year of the war in Vietnam.33
Lippman is skeptical of the value of democratic decision-making when it comes to detailed matters of public policy and would favor a foreign policy made largely by the Executive with the minimum amount of input from the general public. Indeed, Lippman spends a good deal of time describing how, ideally, public policy ought to be made. He pays particular attention to the distinction between those whose job it is to make policy and those whose job it is to implement policy:
The more subtle the elements that enter into the decision, the more irresponsible power the expert wields. He is certain, moreover, to exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the administrator.34
We will now move on to look at whether Lippman’s rather gloomy assessment of how public opinion is formed and the limited utility it has toward policymaking is in fact borne out.
Certainly, members of Congress and the Executive branch seem to have a dim view of the public’s level of interest and intellectual engagement with politics in general, and foreign policy in particular. Research carried out by Steven Kull and I.M. Destler asked members of Congress, their staff, and serving and former members of the Executive branch of Government to describe how they thought the general public thought and felt about foreign policy. The results would seem to be very much in line with Lippman’s concept of public opinion. Certainly, insofar as they see the public as being overwhelmingly self-interested:
I think that’s a traditional American nationalism or isolationism, caused by our history and our geography, which is interrupted when we feel ourselves menaced by outside forces: Hitler, Communism, whatever … I think the traditional American feeling is, mind your own business, take care of your own problems at home, and don’t worry about the carnage in Bosnia or Haiti.35
The aim of Kull and Destler’s research was to find out whether policymakers’ preconceived notions of the public actually matched reality. In order to test this, Kull and Destler designed a series of focus groups across the USA to give them a rough sample of the American population. Kull and Destler then asked a series of questions, both on the general role the public saw the United States as playing in International Relations and a number of questions dealing with more specific topics, such as what the relationship ought to be between the United States and the United Nations.
Kull and Destler on the whole found that the American public were much more willing for the country to play a proactive, and indeed altruistic, role in world affairs than in either Lippman’s theory of public opinion or than the policymaking elites would have expected. For instance, the following question was asked: “do you think it would be best for the future of this country [the United States] if we [Americans] take an active part in world affairs, or if we stay out of world affairs?”36 In answer to this question that was asked by four different polling organizations between October 1990 and September 1996, support for an active American role in world affairs never fell below 57 percent, and peaked at 79 percent.37 This support for American engagement in Kull and Destler’s research seems to flow from a public understanding that America’s prosperity and security is intrinsically dependent on the security and prosperity of the rest of the world. To quote a participant in one of Kull and Destler’s focus groups:
I say invest foreign aid to help people get an education, give them tools to work … and then they begin to build, and then they develop, and they end up buying goods from us, we buy goods from them, they defend us; we defend them.38
The very fact that Kull and Destler went into the level of detail that they did, asking their focus groups not only what they thought but why they thought it, perhaps goes some way to easing the artifice inherent in polling that John Mueller was so skeptical of earlier in this discussion. The work of Bruce Jentleson on the attitudes of the American public towards the use of force in the post-Vietnam era could be seen as supporting Kull and Destler. Jentleson’s central premise is that there are two typologies of the use of force. One is to coerce an adversary; the other is the use of force to achieve political change within another country. Jentleson himself explains his dichotomy in the following terms:
The key distinction is between force used to coerce foreign policy restraint by an adversary engaged in aggressive actions against the United States or its interests, and force used to engineer internal political change within another country whether in support of an existing government considered an ally or seeking to overthrow a government considered an adversary.39
Jentleson finds that, through looking at a study of the mean public support for various foreign policy issues that might have required a military response throughout the 1980s, those that commanded the highest amount of public support over the longest period of time were those engagements where the US was seeking to alter or restrain the behavior of another power, and those scoring the lowest public support were for those issues where US military support was being considered to either remove or sustain a foreign government. So the average support that Jentleson finds for airstrikes against Libya in response to terrorist actions supported by the Libyan Government was 65.2 percent pre-bombing and 70.9 percent post-bombing. In comparison, only an average of 27.3 percent supported aid to the Contras over 43 public opinion polls conducted on the subject, and an average of 19.7 percent of respondents over seven polls conducted supported a US-led invasion of Nicaragua.
So Jentleson’s work very much reinforces the point that Kull and Destler found in their focus groups. The general public may not have a great deal of knowledge about detailed matters of national security policy, but this is not the same thing as saying that the general public do not have preferences over the general types of engagement they want to see the United States involved in, and that these preferences do have an underlying logic to them.
The public’s attitude towards military intervention seems to follow consistently from the public’s desire to be engaged in international affairs, both for reasons of self-interest and altruism. In response to the question, “how much should the US spend for defense?,” the answers were 10 percent—“only enough to protect itself,” 17 percent—“to protect itself and other countries on its own,” and 71 percent—“enough to protect itself and join in multilateral efforts to protect others.”40
What we see from Kull and Destler’s research is that, actually, the public’s attitude towards what US foreign policy ought to be seems to, in contradiction of Lippman’s theory, come from a fairly logically consistent set of propositions: that the US should be involved in world affairs because it is in its own self-interest; that other countries are prosperous and secure enough to trade with and form alliances with the United States; and therefore, that the US should encourage and play its part in a multilateral system of global security.
Interestingly, however, this is not how the policymaking elite see the public. According to Kull and Destler’s research, the policymaking elite would tend to see the public conforming more to the model Lippman lays out. One explanation for this apparent misreading of large swathes of US public opinion might be down to officials treating the most vocal elements of the electorate as though they were the majority. A former Executive branch official described this phenomenon as follows: “Americans who tend to be antiengagement tend to be stronger in their views than those who are proengagement. That has been my experience and Congress has always been sensitive to stronger voices.”41 This is perhaps an understandable phenomenon. Both Congress and the Executive branch would need to take into account not only how the majority of the public feels but how those whose votes are most likely to be influenced by a particular issue are likely to respond. In other words, in a democracy what is perceived as being “public opinion” may not actually be the opinion of the majority but the opinion of the loudest, best organized, most passionate advocates of a certain position.
So where does that leave us in terms of the intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine, and where would that sit in the debate between the optimists and the pessimists on the role and nature of public opinion? Certainly, the adherence of the ideas that would go on to become the Powell Doctrine were acutely concerned about the volatility of public opinion and would agree with Lippman and Mueller up to a point that public opinion is susceptible to violent shifts between strong support for a policy and strong opposition to a policy, and understood how much it could hurt the Army’s reputation and standing to be on the wrong side of a public opinion that had shifted violently against a particular policy. Norman Schwarzkopf can clearly recall, on his return from Vietnam, thinking, “‘I am in the nation’s capital, wearing the uniform of the United States Army, and the people around me see me as some kind of monster!’ The mood of the country had turned ugly.”42 And, certainly, as we have already seen in Chapter 2,43 one of the perceived advantages of the use of overwhelming force is the ability to minimize your own casualties. This would certainly indicate an acknowledgement of John Mueller’s point that public consent to military action is tied to maintaining relatively low casualties. However, whilst adherence to the intellectual climate that formed the Powell Doctrine might be skeptical of the public’s endurance for prolonged military engagement, the insistence on the need for public support presupposes that public support can be maintained and won, and the public does have underlying logical preferences about the kinds of military operations it wants to see the US getting involved in. As Powell himself puts this, “when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.”44 This implies that the public in general are capable of maintaining a consistent position based on underlying preferences so long as the original objective of any military intervention meets with public approval.
There is another argument connected with the role of public opinion in Foreign and National Security policymaking that we have yet to address. Even if we accept that the public care about the US’s role internationally, and even if we accept that the public are capable of determining their broad policy preferences in a logical manner, it does not follow necessarily that these preferences would actually be in the “national interest” of the United States. The diplomat and historian George Kennan sums up this dilemma with the following observation:
A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue. Democracy fights in anger—it fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it—to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end.45
Notice that nothing that Kennan has described is illogical or necessarily subject to violent changes in public opinion. After all, it is perfectly logical to say that, because wars are painful, they ought to be avoided, and that when war is necessary those who cause it should be punished. However, Kennan’s point is that, whilst his position may be logical and may make a degree of moral sense, it is not necessarily in the US’s interest to behave this way. For instance, Kennan has this to say about the US’s role in the First World War:
In any case, once we were at war, it did not appear to us that our greatest danger might still lie precisely in too long a continuation of the war, in the destruction of Europe’s equilibrium, and in the sapping of the vital energies of the European peoples. It did not appear to us then that the greatest interest we had in the war was still that it should be brought to an end as soon as possible on a basis involving a minimum maladjustment and as much stability as possible for the future.46
In order to have perceived the true stakes for the US in the First World War and to come to the conclusion that Kennan comes to, one would have to either be looking back on the First World War in hindsight or be possessed of a high degree of knowledge of various European cultures and European political history. It is not reasonable to expect the majority of people in a democracy to have these attributes. Therefore, if we accept Kennan’s argument, foreign policy ought to be made primarily by a diplomatic elite sensitive to the country’s true interests by virtue of their knowledge of history, their cultural sensitivity, and their diplomatic skill. Presumably in the American system of government, this elite would reside in the Executive branch of government. If we follow Kennan’s argument, this elite would make policy with little regard to the public opinion of the moment, but would instead be focused on longer range American “interests.”
The problem with Kennan’s argument is twofold. First, on a theoretical level, if you follow what Kennan is saying to its logical conclusion, it undermines the very basis of democracy. If the general public is unable to see what is good for itself and needs to rely on a self-selected elite to make its foreign policy, why would the same not hold true in domestic policy. In his more melancholic moments, Kennan recognized this shortcoming himself. Kennan’s biographer Nicholas Thompson describes an essay Kennan wrote called “The Prerequisites.” Thompson describes the argument of the essay as follows:
He [Kennan] did not want a dictatorship but, in full misanthrope mode, he declared that this dreadful country needed the firm hands of a group of young, dedicated, organized, and highly educated men. The new order would deny suffrage to immigrants, women, and blacks. Clear-sighted white men would make decisions wisely and quickly for the general good.47
Fortunately for Kennan’s reputation, this essay was not discovered until the 1970s and the essay’s extreme tone can be excused as a letting off of steam by a misanthropic intellectual in a bad mood. However, the implication of a more authoritarian system of government than most Americans would be prepared to contemplate is still at least present in the background of Kennan’s views on the “correct” way of making foreign policy. The second flaw with Kennan’s argument is, even if we were to accept for a moment that his way of making foreign policy was desirable, and even we were to accept that a democracy in domestic affairs tied to an elite-led foreign policy were possible, it is unlikely that the American public, raised on the political idea that they live in the world’s greatest democracy, would actually be prepared in the real world to accept the state of affairs that Kennan asks them to accept. Nevertheless, as we shall see later in this chapter, Kennan’s idea of a foreign policy decided by those in the Executive branch of government most “qualified” has an enduring appeal. However, advocates of the Powell Doctrine would argue, as Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger did argue, that, whatever the theoretical merits of Kennan’s position, given the changing nature of the press and Congress’s willingness to assert itself in foreign policy, following Kennan’s model was not a practical proposition in the modern world.
We have looked at how public, Congressional and media attitudes changed during Vietnam. It is time to turn our attention towards the case study for this chapter, which is US policy towards Central America between 1979 and 1984. Before we can discuss US foreign policy towards the region during this period and why the public debate over the issue raised so many of the ghosts of Vietnam, we must first look at the historical context that this policy was made in.
The United States has traditionally seen Central America as its geo-political backyard. This should not be surprising, given the enormous economic leverage that the US could wield. By the end of the US Civil War the United States was ready to become the pre-eminent power in the western hemisphere:
By the 1890s, the primary North American influence in the region was rapidly growing investments in banana and coffee plantations, railroads (to haul the bananas, not people), gold and silver mines, and, a little later, utilities and government securities.48
With growing economic interests came increasingly frequent military interventions in order to protect those interests, both from the British, who, in the late nineteenth century, were seen as potential competitors, but more often from local political instability and civil war. Theodore Roosevelt declared that ‘The United States had to assume an attitude of protection and regulation with regard to all these little states’49.
This was a clear extension of US policy which had, since the early nineteenth century seen any expansion of European influence in the Americas as a direct threat to its own security.
The Administration of William Howard Taft sent two and a half thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1912, to put down a rebellion against a government friendly to the US. Taft claimed that the US had a “moral mandate to exert its influence for the preservation of the general peace of Central America which is seriously menaced by the present uprising.”50 US Marines were constantly deployed throughout Central America, particularly Nicaragua, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The point to be taken is that US has a long history of military intervention in Central America and an even longer history of economic and strategic interests in the region.
If one wanted a more recent example of US military intervention in neighboring states in Central America and the Caribbean, one need look no further than the decision to intervene in the Dominican Republic in 1965. The Dominican intervention took place at precisely the same time that Lyndon Johnson was taking the fateful decisions that would commit the US to war in South-East Asia. There are a number of striking parallels between the situation in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Nicaragua in 1978–79. In both cases the US had to deal with the aftermath of long periods of dictatorial rule. Jerome Slater, one of the earliest authors on the Dominican intervention, describes the presidency of Rafael Trujillo as “thirty years of one of the worst tyrannies of the twentieth century.”51 Bernard Diederich explains how, “ … the Somozas had the right to abuse whom they liked—all in the name of anticommunism.”52
In both cases the US was seen as having endorsed, supported and at times propped up, both Trujillo and the Somozas. Diederich writes that the departure of US marines from Nicaragua in 1932 left two legacies:
The National Guard they created and trained and the man who was later referred to as “the last Marine,” Anastasio Somoza García (Tacho I*), who was immediately appointed jefe director of the guard at the age of thirty-seven.”53
In the case of Trujillo, Abraham Lowenthal refers to the fact that, “Trujillo assiduously maintained his contacts with American Marine officials and subsidized extensive lobbying operations of various types to advance his personal and political interests.”54
There was concern in both cases that a broad based opposition movement to dictatorship could be hijacked by Communist elements:
The leaders included at least two prominent members of ex-President Juan Bosch’s Dominican Revolutionary Party: Jose Francisco Pena, a skilled and eloquent agitator, and Miguel Soto, who directs the party’s affiliated labor federation. Both are identified with the party’s left wing and both have been suspected of ties to the extreme left. Available information indicates that individuals identified with the pro-Castro 14th of June political movement were also involved, along with representatives of extremist student groups.55
Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-Texas), summed up the conservative view of the opposition to the Somozas with the following observation:
Twenty years ago we believed Castro when he stated that he was neither a communist nor a socialist … Look we were wrong from the beginning to the end. We sympathized with the Castroites because of the human rights issue and we destabilized Somoza’s regime because of the same issue. Now we are condemned to lose both. On the one hand our friend and ally and on the other hand the Nicaraguan people will not enjoy human rights.56
However, this is where the similarity between the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua ends. The US took the radical step of invading the Dominican Republic with 22,000 marines, installing a provisional government largely of its own choosing, and holding elections that resulted in a democratic, but decidedly pro-American government. The US intervention in the Dominican Republic took place without the approval of the Organization of American States (OAS). The initial intervention involved US troops exclusively.
As we shall see, US policy towards the situation in Nicaragua never moved close to this level of involvement. Of course the one major geopolitical difference between these two cases was that the Dominican intervention took place contemporaneously with US involvement in Vietnam. The Nicaraguan revolution of 1978–79 took place in the aftermath of Vietnam. As we have already seen in this chapter, Vietnam had a profound impact on Congress and the general public’s appetite for US military interventions.
The argument under consideration is not that the US tried but failed to follow through on a policy of military intervention in Nicaragua, but rather that the US government, knowing that it would not be able to rally public support, never seriously considered the option in the first place. As we have seen, this reluctance to contemplate military intervention in Central America goes against the grain of past US policy dating from the nineteenth century.
The events of 1979 could not have come at a worse time for the Carter Administration. Already buffeted by events in Iran and Afghanistan, Carter’s beleaguered foreign policy team now had to turn their attention to events closer to home. Nicaragua at this point was not a subject that merited much serious public attention, the only exception being when US citizens found themselves caught in the crossfire between government and rebel forces. Therefore, policy makers were initially free to devise a strategy toward Nicaragua without having to take public opinion into account. The divisions within the Carter Administration soon became apparent and deeply entrenched. The State Department’s view was that the best way to deal with the situation was to accept the change of regime as a fait accompli on the grounds that the US was in no position to reverse the outcome of the revolution and that hostility towards the new government was only likely to push it towards Cuba and the Soviet Union. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance summed up the State Department’s position in a memo to President Carter: “Our ability to exert influence during this formative period is contingent on their belief that our policies are not aimed against them.”57 The State Department’s view of the Sandinista regime was that it could be influenced by the giving or withholding of aid.
The National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued that the revolution in Nicaragua was part of a pattern of Soviet expansion in the Third World and that the US should do everything in its power to make sure that a friendly regime was installed in Nicaragua. Brzezinski’s preferred solution was that the US should intervene as part of a regional force, but he was prepared to consider unilateral intervention, should that be the only option open.
Brzezinski’s proposal was that the US ought to intervene as part of a multilateral force under the authority of the OAS. In order to be a credible proposal this required significant participation by other Latin American States, and this was not forthcoming because most Latin American States had a visceral aversion to US intervention in their internal affairs and because the Sandinistas were seen as preferable to the previous regime. Given the lack of OAS support, the US was left in the position of having to intervene unilaterally in order to prevent the Sandinista victory.
There is no evidence that this possibility was seriously considered by anybody other than Brzezinski. Considering its history in the region intervention, on the face of it, would seem to be the natural US policy. The fact that the US did not intervene, coupled with the fact that this prospect was never even seriously contemplated, leads to only one conclusion. In the wake of Vietnam, senior US policymakers were simply not prepared to engage in overt military intervention in the developing world to prop up a friendly but corrupt regime with a poor human rights record.
The point to be noted here in terms of winning and holding public support for a military intervention is that, if one subscribes to the model of public opinion put forward by scholars such as Lippman and Mueller, public opinion on National Security policy is essentially a formless series of images and stereotypes that is waiting for Executive action to mobilize and mould it in a certain way. Then before one can get to the point of talking about public opinion on the subject of military intervention in Nicaragua, there is a requirement that the Executive branch of Government should have a clear idea about what policy ought to be pursued if public opinion is going to be mobilized. Because, when it came to Nicaragua, the Carter Administration never came close to achieving this kind of consensus, public opinion, as described by Lippman and Mueller, never had a settled view on military intervention on Nicaragua.
What we can also see is that part of the reason for the reticence of senior US officials to even consider the possibility of military intervention was that they saw a strong parallel between what was going on in Nicaragua and Vietnam. The majority of the Carter Administration rejected intervention in Nicaragua on those grounds. Some in the Reagan Administration were keen for military intervention on those grounds. Some hoped that Nicaragua would be the turning point beyond which the US could lay the ghost of Vietnam to rest. President Reagan’s First Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, summed up how Central America could be used to erase the mistakes of Vietnam: “A quick victory in Central America would begin purging the national psyche of the Vietnam syndrome, rebuilding the pre-Vietnam consensus for aggressive containment.”58
The US Military also clearly understood the parallel between Central American and Vietnam:
Many of the senior military had feared a Central American Vietnam and by making their fears known in advance, they had sought to shape the debate to pre-empt certain policies. Most important, the military had advised publically against the commitment of US combat forces in the region except in certain conditions—conditions developed with an eye to avoiding another Vietnam.59
We can see here a fundamental difference in views between Haig and senior Military Officers. Implicit in the two quotations given above are different views of the Vietnam War. For Haig, the US’s commitment to Vietnam was the correct strategic decision for the United States to take at the time, and part of what he calls “aggressive containment,” which had marked US policy towards the Soviet Union since the late 1940s. For Haig, one of the factors driving his view of Central American policy was to re-establish an atmosphere in the US that was conducive to the pursuit of “aggressive containment.” On the other hand, according to the senior Military figures the US decision to intervene in Vietnam was not strategically correct, nor would they necessarily see the US strategy in Vietnam and Southeast Asia as being central to containing the Soviet Union. The entire point of drawing parallels between the situation in Central America and the situation in South Vietnam was to avoid creating an atmosphere in which the pursuit of Vietnam-style strategies of “aggressive containment” could be pursued. Interestingly, the general public took the side of the senior Military officials. Gallup found, in polling done between 1981 and 1983, between 62 and 74 percent of the public who knew about the situation in El Salvador thought that it had the potential to turn into a Vietnam-style situation.60
The transition between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was one of the starkest changes in philosophy between two Presidents. Jimmy Carter represented the political zenith of the idea that Vietnam should mark a fundamental transition in the way US foreign policy was conducted. Carter believed that US foreign policy should be less militaristic, less obsessed with the threat of global communism and more attentive to the promotion of democracy and human rights. Ronald Reagan was, in contrast, the arch cold warrior. To him, Vietnam was a temporary aberration, an example of what happens when politicians lacked the will to do what was necessary to stand up to the expansion of global communism. These philosophical differences were to have a major impact on every facet of US foreign policy, none more so than in US dealings with Nicaragua.
Although Reagan had a very definite idea about what his foreign policy objectives should be, he also had to face the political reality that, although he personally had won in a landslide against Carter,61 he had not been able to carry Congress with him. The House of Representatives remained in Democratic control. Despite a slim Republican majority in the Senate, the presence of a small group of moderate Republicans meant that in order to achieve both his domestic and global goals Reagan would have to engage in coalition building.
Central American problems were high in the in-tray of the incoming Administration. The Nicaraguan revolution had given left-wing guerrillas in the region, particularly in El Salvador, inspiration, and had also provided an important logistical staging area for the smuggling of arms from Cuba. The early months of 1981 were spent in furious internal debate, the outcome of which would shape policy for the remainder of Reagan’s seven and a half years in office. It is in this context that we see for the first time a real debate between those who favored direct military intervention in Central America, represented principally by Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, and those who were much more wary of the idea of military intervention, represented principally by Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger.
Alexander Haig was the most senior advisor who advocated a military solution to US problems in Central America, having served in Vietnam as a Colonel and in Washington as a military aide to Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. Haig was intimately familiar both with the military and political history of US involvement in Vietnam. From this experience Haig drew lessons that were to inform his approach to Nicaragua and Central American issues in general.
Haig viewed world affairs as a zero sum game involving the US and the USSR. The North Vietnamese, in Haig’s view had been proxies of the Soviet Union and the biggest single mistake the US made in Vietnam was not addressing the source of the problem. Instead of bombing targets in North Vietnam, the US should have put more pressure on the Soviets to cease the economic aid, which, in Haig’s view, kept the North Vietnamese economy going. The US could have killed as many North Vietnamese troops as it liked; the fundamental problem was that the Soviet Union would make sure that their replacements were always properly supplied.
When it came to Central America then, Haig was not keen to see US Marines patrolling the Nicaraguan jungle. Nicaragua was not the problem. It was the Soviets and the Cubans who provided support for Nicaragua that were the real problem. Rather, he felt that the focus should be on removing the logistical support from Central American leftists by taking strong action against Cuba. Shortly after his inauguration, Haig asked his assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Thomas Enders, to draw up a list of options for retaliatory action against Cuba. The most severe option that Haig favored was a reintroduction of the 1962 blockade. Haig was aware that such action had the potential to raise tension with the Soviets to dangerous levels but from his point of view this had its advantages. First, it would signal to the Soviets that the US had recovered from its post-Vietnam malaise and was prepared to assert itself when its interests were threatened. On a more regional level, it would prove to the Soviets that the US took the potential spread of communism in Central America as a matter of the highest importance, and that if the Soviet wanted progress on other issues they should not interfere in Central America.
Haig had no time for the argument that such a high-risk policy was impractical because it would not command public or Congressional support. In Haig’s view, the Executive should decide what the best policy is in terms of national interest and then worry about selling it to the public. Haig’s attitude can be summed up by a passing comment he made in his memoirs on what the priority for the in-coming President ought to be “The new President, in his first days, had to move against the uncertainty. He had to act decisively and directly on the Soviet Union62.” In this short passage Haig shows that it is up to the President and those around him to act decisively and with speed and public opinion is an issue to be addressed later, very much in line with the views of George Kennan, discussed earlier in this chapter. Haig also believed that public disenchantment with Vietnam was not due to the US being overly aggressive, but was in fact due to the opposite. Haig argued that up until the US began withdrawing troops, the majority of the American public was in favor of more forceful action in Vietnam, not less. Haig was confident that in the final analysis if the Administration could present its case as to why Central America was so important the American people would support tough action. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, the intellectual climate nurtured by people like Summers, that led to the Powell Doctrine, would hold the opposite opinion to Haig.63 In terms of the intellectual climate that engendered the Powell Doctrine, public support is not something you go out to win after deciding what policy ought to be. A level of public support ought to exist for a policy before it is embarked upon.
Haig’s opponents on this debate alongside Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger were the President’s domestic policy advisers James Baker, Michael Deaver, and Edwin Messe.
Weinberger’s chief concern was to re-establish strategic parity with the Soviets. Any course of action that threatened to derail his spending and policy priorities, he was opposed to. Weinberger knew that military action in Central America had the potential to become a sinkhole down which the extra billions of the Reagan defense build-up would be poured. Aside from this argument, of all the people who held the office of Secretary of Defense, Weinberger was probably the one most sympathetic to the military’s point of view. One of Weinberger’s chief priorities in restoring the military’s effectiveness was to rebuild its public image and re-establish trust between the military and the American people. One of the worst things that could happen from Weinberger’s point of view was that the military would once again be bogged down in an open-ended, complex and morally ambiguous war in Central America: “You had to have some reasonable anticipation of the support of the American people and the Congress. You couldn’t fight a war against an enemy here and against the American people at home.”64 Whereas Haig saw public opinion and Congress as essentially passive institutions waiting for the Executive to decide on matters of foreign policy, Weinberger saw the Legislative and Executive branches of the US Government as being jointly responsible for the conduct of foreign policy and that, not only are they jointly responsible for any decisions taken, but that the evolution of policy is a process of ongoing consultation between the two branches:
This support [Congressional support] cannot be achieved unless we are candid in making clear the threats we face; the support cannot be sustained without continuing and close consultation. We cannot fight a battle with the Congress at home while asking our troops to win a war.65
Weinberger was not alone in believing this. In 1983, recently retired Chief of Staff of the Army Lieutenant General Edward C. Meyer commented that military intervention in Central America should not be undertaken unless there is “a consensus within the United States that what we’re doing is sufficiently important that American soldiers go there.”66
The President’s domestic advisers worried that a strong stand in Central America would distract Congressional attention away from the ambitious program of economic reform that Reagan hoped to pass. The polls would certainly give the President’s domestic advisors cause for serious concern about the public’s attitude towards Nicaragua. A poll conducted for ABC and The Washington Post newspaper found that in 1983 only 13 percent of respondents favored overthrowing the government of Nicaragua, while 78 percent were against US involvement in any change of regime.67 Reagan’s domestic policy advisors knew that Central America was an issue that was likely to split the fragile coalition that they had managed to assemble between conservative Democrats and Republicans.
Nicaragua was an issue where Congressional opinion was very evenly divided between those in favor of the US supporting a change in regime, and those that believed that the US ought to stay out of Nicaraguan politics. In the 98th, 99th and 100th Congress, 70.5 percent of all Members of the House of Representatives had a perfectly consistent voting record when it came to Nicaragua.68
The swing votes that did exist were overwhelmingly those of Southern Democrats and a few Northern Liberal Republicans in the House. The group of Southern Democrats that constituted the bulk of the swing vote on the Nicaragua issues also constituted the group that gave President Reagan a working majority in a Democratic-controlled House. As William LeoGrande put it, “The success of Ronald Reagan’s legislative program was largely due to his ability to win the support of these conservative southern Democrats.”69 Therefore, Reagan’s political advisers wanted to put as little strain as possible on this coalition, and wanted to avoid protracted debates on Central American issues, particularly any inference that the US was considering direct intervention.
As we can see, Haig was badly outnumbered in this debate and his preferences, particularly with regard to Cuba, were quickly swept aside. This left the Reagan Administration in a quandary; it wanted to take some form of strong action that would stand the tide of Communist expansion it in its own backyard, but at the same time it feared that to do so was to invite rancorous public debate and distract it from other priorities.
We can see here how the intellectual climate that gave rise to the Powell Doctrine’s insistence on public support before overt military action can be undertaken has had profound effect on US policy. Because President Reagan realized that his Secretary of Defense was not likely to go along with overt military intervention in Nicaragua without overwhelming public support. This led President Reagan to turn towards the CIA and a program of covert action to achieve his objectives in Nicaragua.
One of the principal advantages of covert action is that, because such operations by definition take place in secret, it would not be necessary to have public support before undertaking them. Normally the logistical support for such operations would be provided by the Department of Defense, but because such support might have rung alarm bells in Congress, in the case of Nicaragua this support was provided by third parties—in particular Honduras and Argentina70. Ironically, this resort to covert action made gaining public support for any consideration of overt action in the future that much more difficult to gain because the Reagan Administration had to take care not to reveal too much of its policy towards Nicaragua for fear of exposing its covert operations, and this therefore restricted its ability to shape the debate over what the US ought to do about the situation in Nicaragua.
By 1984, the CIA’s operations in Nicaragua had expanded massively and the Contras71 were able to support and maintain a force numbering several thousand in the field at any one time. However, the Nicaraguan government was no closer to being overthrown and, disturbingly from the CIA’s point of view, still had access to overseas aid and trade. In order to remove this lifeline a plan was hatched to mine Nicaragua’s main harbors.
By undertaking this operation, the CIA had placed itself in a role which violated international law, and would be seen by the world as an act of war. If this operation was blown there was every chance that the Nicaraguan government would have retaliated directly against Americans. The intellectual climate within the US Military that led to the Powell Doctrine, wholly supported by Secretary Weinberger, had ruled out the overt use of military force by the United States. In order to achieve its objectives the Reagan Administration had undertaken covert action, which had far fewer institutional restraints on it and did not require public support. Nevertheless, this action could have placed the US in a state of war. Because of the restrictions of the Powell Doctrine, and, because of its own internal division, the Reagan Administration had placed the United States in a situation where its covert military involvement meant the US could have found itself at war without the public, Congress or even the Military having been consulted.
What is startling about this episode is that the CIA conceived and executed the entire project entirely off its own back. Although the US Military supplied the explosives, they did not know what they were supplying them for. Not only was the US Military kept in the dark, but also the Congressional Intelligence Committee was informed of the mining in such a way that it was almost inevitable that the true implications would be missed. It is not a stretch of the imagination to see why the CIA did this72. Had senior Military Officials been aware of what was happening, they would have been duty bound to have reported the fact that Weinberger, who in all probability, given his previous record, would have done everything he could to have the operation stopped. The Military’s intense desire not to get into a war that did not command public support meant that it was cut out of the policy-making loop.
We must now turn our attention to how the need for public and Congressional support affects the other elements of the Powell Doctrine. The first element that we will look at is how the need for public and Congressional support relates to the Powell Doctrine’s call for military intervention to have clear objectives.
One of the reasons why the Reagan Administration consistently struggled to win public acceptance of a policy of overt military action towards Nicaragua73 was that it was never entirely clear exactly what the Reagan Administration was hoping to achieve. Was it trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua? Was it trying to persuade the government of Nicaragua to moderate its behavior internationally? Or was it trying to promote democracy in Nicaragua? Roy Gutman, characterized the debates taking place within the Reagan Administration about what US policy towards Nicaragua should be in the following way:
It was a classic Washington power struggle. Each side could block the other. The hard right was a broad, informal, and shifting group. All processed, and most shared, Reagan’s ideology—in particular his anticommunism and his deep distrust of the Soviet Union … Enders [Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America] and the Central America specialists at State who backed him up certainly were not soft on communism, but they tried to preserve flexibility in policy that would allow occasional testing of the possibilities for a peaceful solution.74
The Reagan Administration’s public rhetoric and its private discussions at different times support all three interpretations. For instance, the first finding75 on Nicaragua justified the operation in terms of recruiting Nicaraguan fighters in order to prevent arms smuggling between Nicaragua and El Salvador. Yet, the operations the Contras undertook seemed to suggest that the objective was to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. At the same time, Assistant Secretary of State Enders was travelling to Nicaragua to attempt to negotiate a settlement with the Sandinistas to reduce armed smuggling to El Salvador.
Reagan was not beyond using sweeping, not to say bloodcurdling, rhetoric in order to justify US support of the Contras:
I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States. This danger will not go away; it will grow worse, much worse, if we fail to take action now. I’m speaking of Nicaragua, a Soviet ally on the American mainland only 2 hours’ flying time from our own borders … Gathered in Nicaragua already are thousands of Cuban military advisers, contingents of Soviets and East Germans, and all the elements of international terror—from the PLO to Italy’s Red Brigades. Why are they there? Because as Colonel Qadhafi has publicly exulted: ‘Nicaragua means a great thing: it means fighting America near its borders, fighting America at its doorstep.’76
One can certainly be forgiven for being confused over how such rhetoric was supposed to square with the idea that CIA support for the Contras was limited to simply stopping arms smuggling across Nicaragua’s borders.
These contradictory activities tended to suggest that the Reagan Administration itself did not know what it wanted to achieve. The consequence of this was that it sent out mixed messages to various foreign and domestic audiences. All this activity served merely to confuse Congress as to what exactly it was being asked to support. At best the Administration looked evasive, at worst it looked like it did not know what it was doing. A clear example of this is the different recollections that members of the Congressional Intelligence Committees have of their briefing on the aims and objectives of CIA operations in Nicaragua:
Some members of the committee later claimed that Casey ‘did nothing to suggest an anti-Sandinista political dimension’ to the covert program. Others recall that he did … Congressman Lee Hamilton wrote years later that Casey told the committee ‘there would be a military arm and a separate political arm which would attempt to secure support from other nations.’77
It is of course arguable that the Administration’s goal from first to last was perfectly clear. It wanted to remove the Sandinistas from power. However, from what we now know of the internal discussions, which took place within the first year of the Reagan Administration, it does seem that, at least initially, the US’s objective was something short of overthrowing the Sandinista regime. Thomas Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, described the initial covert plan of action for Nicaragua presented to Ronald Reagan as, “a lowball option, a small operation not intended to overthrow,” and which would “harass the government, waste it.”78 And William Casey, in his first description of the CIA’s role in arming the Contras, described it as “a small number of paramilitary fighters who would be trained and armed to conduct raids against the Sandinistas’ supply of arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas.”79 Even if one were to accept the argument that the Reagan Administration, whatever it said to Congress and the press, always, in the final analysis, wanted to remove the Sandinista regime, because these were not the terms in which the policy was sold, either to Congress or the public, at the very least the Reagan Administration’s public rhetoric was not consistent with the more limited objectives it claimed to be interested in. At the very least, in the public and Congressional minds, this made the Reagan Administration look as if it did know what it wanted to achieve, because its means and its rhetoric were out of step with one another.
We will now move on to look at how the intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine’s call for public and Congressional support relates to its call for force to only be used in the vital national interest.
The idea of what constitutes “vital interest” is, almost by definition, an extremely vague and nebulous one. Perhaps one of the best ways of defining it is; what does the public and its elected representatives think is vital? Nicaragua clearly did not fall within the definition of “vital” for a large part of the American public or many members of Congress.80
The reason for this is not hard to find. The further south and west one moves, the closer to the Mexican border one gets and the more Central America seems ominously close at hand. It was a constant feature of Reagan’s public rhetoric to point out how close Nicaragua was to the United States. The following quotation is taken from a speech Reagan delivered to Congress on the need to resume funding of lethal aid to the Contras:
I’ve asked for $100 million and we’ll fight for it … you can’t stop tanks and gunships with bandages and bedrolls. Defeat for the Contras would mean another Cuba on the mainland of North America … It would mean consolidation of a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just two days driving time from Harlingen, Texas.81
Reagan was not above using even more blatantly anti-immigrant rhetoric to justify US involvement in Nicaragua:
Should that [Reagan is referring to the consolidation of Soviet and Cuban influence in Central America] happen, desperate Latin peoples by the millions would begin fleeing north into the cities of the southern United States or to wherever some hope of freedom remained.82
However, even with this strategy of playing on the fear of the domestic repercussions of events in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration was never able to convince the majority of the American people that the Sandinistas posed a real threat to national security.83 This is something that the Reagan Administration acknowledged, at least in private. A National Security Council memo noted that the Administration had, “Failed to make the case that the Sandistas are indeed a sufficient threat to our national security that justifies a major covert action/paramilitary program.”84
In order to have gained the public support necessary for a major overt military intervention or a ramping up of aid to the Contras, Reagan would have had to have convincingly demonstrated that events in Nicaragua posed a major and imminent threat to the United States as a whole. This would have been in itself a hard task given the enormous disparity in power between Nicaragua and the US.
As we have already seen the second strategy which the Reagan Administration used was to ignore the local implications of the Nicaraguan conflict, and instead focus on how events in Nicaragua formed part of a greater Soviet push for influence in Central America. This was an argument that the Reagan Administration made with much fanfare and great gusto. However, a major problem stood in its way. Whilst the Soviets were prepared to supply the Sandinistas with arms, they went to great lengths not to supply them with anything that could be perceived as an offensive threat towards the United States. For example, when the US protested against the delivery of military jets85, their delivery was swiftly cancelled.
The Soviets themselves seemed eager for a solution to the Nicaraguan problem. From a Soviet point of view, the revolution in Nicaragua was a mixed blessing. On the one hand it provided the Soviets with a potential new ally in the western hemisphere, on the other it provided them with another ally far from their own shores which would demand the same economic aid received by Cuba and Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe at a time when the USSR could scarcely afford another drain on its resources. In summation, the Reagan Administration was never able to form a public consensus around the idea that events in Nicaragua represented a vital interest, not because the public or Congress were stupid or uninformed, but because there were solid reasons why Nicaragua was of no more than marginal strategic interest to the United States. Clearly, what constitutes “national interest” is always a matter of debate and contestation. The point to be noted here is that the Reagan Administration failed to win that debate in the minds of a large majority of the American public when it came to Nicaragua.
As we have seen, the Reagan Administration’s policy towards Nicaragua fails at least three of the tests laid down by the Powell Doctrine and the thinking that lead to it. It did not have public and Congressional support, its objectives were neither clear nor consistent, and the issue of whether events in Nicaragua fell within the scope of the United States’ vital interests was debatable at best.
In this chapter we have seen that the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate that gave birth to an insistence on the need for public support was created less by imperatives originating from within the military than by a broader change in public and Congressional attitudes towards how foreign policy was made in the mid to late 1970s.
Having a public that is willing to make the sacrifices that prolonged military action requires is vital for success, but the key element that the Powell Doctrine and the intellectual climate that brought it about is that they seem to assume that Presidents can only react to public and Congressional opinion, rather than shaping it. Whether he was right or wrong about the particular instance of US policy towards Central America, Alexander Haig was right to point out that sometimes Presidents cannot afford to wait for public opinion to swing behind them. Sometimes a President has to act and then explain and bring the public along behind a course of action. Haig’s immediate successor George Shultz summed up the problem that relying on consensus for foreign policy decisions poses: “his [Shultz’s] most important remark was a statement made in passing that decisions to use force ‘cannot be tied to opinion polls.”86
The lesson that the Reagan Administration’s policy towards Nicaragua teaches us is that the Powell Doctrine and its preceding intellectual climate are essentially correct insofar as they acknowledge the importance of public support, although they are incorrect in that they assume that public support must exist a priori and cannot be built, and that policymakers should avoid the twin extremes of either trying to execute policy by stealth or by pandering to the interest group that shouts loudest and longest about a particular policy. Instead, an administration should realize that a public, whilst not knowing the intricacies of foreign policies debates, do have underlying preferences about how they see themselves and their country. Policy should be made in such a way as to conform as closely as possible to these preferences.
1 Caspar W. Weinberger, 1984. The Uses of Military Power [Online: National Press Club, Washington, D.C., November 28] Emphasis added. Available at: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/force/weinberger.html [Accessed February 2, 2007]. Emphasis added.
2 Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion. America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp.38–9.
3 National Security Council, 1950. NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs For National Security. [Online]. Available at: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm [Accessed December 9, 2013].
4 Ibid.
5 This overlooks the fact that the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) gives Congress the sole power to declare war and issue letters of Marque and reprisal. The full text of the US Constitution can be found online at: http://www.consource.org/index.asp?bid=529.
6 For a discussion of how these Republican attacks wounded Truman and the Democratic Party and how they eventually led to the McCarthyite witch hunts see, David M. Ofshinsky, A Conspiracy so Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983).
7 For detailed accounts of these crises and the Eisenhower Administration’s response to them, see Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower. Volume two, The President, 1952–1969 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), and Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles: The Diplomacy of the Eisenhower Era (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973).
8 The text of the resolution is taken from: http://cns.miis.edu/straittalk/Appendix%2016.htm (link no longer active). Emphasis added.
9 A Grand Delusion, p.205. Fulbright later put forward his views on the failings of American foreign policy in general and what Congress’ proper role should be in making foreign policy in a book: J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (London: Cape, 1967). For a more in-depth discussion of how Presidents were able to dominate foreign policy debates between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
10 These voting records are taken from: http://cns.miis.edu/straittalk/Appendix%2016.htm (link no longer available).
11 A Commission supported by the Miller Centre of the University of Virginia chaired by former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher recently issued a report recommending new legislation to spell out the roles of Congress and the President in deciding when to undertake military action. The full text of their report can be found at: http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/pdf/National_War_Powers_Commission_Report.pdf.
12 Adam Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p.199.
13 For a vivid account of how real that fear had become and the role it played in US decision making see: Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
14 Full text of The War Powers Act of 1973, Public Law 93–148, 93rd Congress, H. J. Res. 542, November 7, 1973 can be found at: http://www.thecre.com/fedlaw/legal22/warpow.htm.
15 Ibid.
16 The War Powers Act of 1973.
17 President George H.W. Bush argues strenuously in his memoirs that, in the context of the Gulf War, he held the Constitutional right to act without Congressional approval. See George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage, 1999), pp.397–8.
18 For a radical account of the Vietnam antiwar movement see Fred Halstead, Out Now! A participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War (New York: Monad Press, distributed by Pathfinder Press, 1978). Halstead was a member of several Trotskyite groups and helped organize antiwar demonstrations in Washington and New York.
19 For a more left liberal analysis of the antiwar movement see: Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002).
20 Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1999), p.66.
21 Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), p.20.
22 The Wars of Watergate, p.168.
23 Lieutenant Colonel Herb Brown, USAF, Lieutenant Commander Mark L. Bowlin, USN, and Major Scott C. Sheltz, USA. 2002. How the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive Strike Meets the Test of the Powell Doctrine, Joint Forces Staff College, Joint and Combined Staff Officer School. [Online]. Available at: http://www.jfsc.ndu.edu/current_students/documents_policies/documents/jca_cca_awsp/bush_doctrine.doc [Accessed January 6, 2007].
24 Lance Luksik, LCDR, USN, Eric Moses, Maj, USAF, and John Woodward, MAJ, USA. 2008. Keeping the Fire Lit. Democracy and the Long War, Joint Forces Staff College, Joint and Combined Warfighting School. [Online]. Available at: http://www.jfsc.ndu.edu/current_students/documents_policies/documents/jca_cca_awsp/Keeping_the_Fire_Lit%20_Democracy_and_the_Long_War.doc [Accessed January 8, 2007].
25 Colonel Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Presido Press, 1982), p.35.
26 General Williams Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Double Day and Company, 1976), p.412.
27 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1922; LaVergne: Greenbook Publications, 2010), p.47.
28 Lippman 1922, p.171.
29 Lippman 1922, p.173.
30 Don Oberdorfer, Tet!: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), 160.
31 John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome,” Foreign Affairs, 84(6) (Nov/Dec 2005), pp.44–54.
32 John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), p.1.
33 Mueller 1985, pp.116–17.
34 Public Opinion, p.201.
35 Steven Kull and I.M. Destler, Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), p.37.
36 Kull and I.M. Destler 1999, p.42–3.
37 Figure 2-1, Kull and I.M. Destler 1999, p.43.
38 Kull and I.M. Destler 1999, p.54.
39 Bruce W. Jentleson, “The Pretty Prudent Public: Post Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force,” International Studies Quarterly [Online], 36(1) (March 1992), pp.49–50. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600916 [Accessed May 7, 2013].
40 Figure 6.2, Kull and I.M. Destler, Misreading the Public, p.148.
41 Kull and I.M. Destler 1999, p.213.
42 H. Norman Schwarzkopf, with Peter Petre, The Autobiography: It doesn’t Take a Hero (London: Bantam Books, 1993), pp.202–3.
43 See pp.144–5.
44 Colin L. Powell, with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), p.143.
45 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), p.65–6.
46 Kennan 1969, p.66.
47 Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009), p.41.
48 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolution : The United States in Central America, 2nd ed., rev. and expanded (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), p.31.
49 Robert Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990 (New York: Free Press, 1996), p.4.
50 Kagan 1996, p.6.
51 Jerome Slater, Intervention and Negotiation. The United States and the Dominican Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p.2.
52 Bernard Diederich, Somoza and the Legacy of US Involvement in Central America (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007), preface p.vii.
53 Diederich 2007, p.15.
* Both Somozas were referred to as “Tacho.”
54 Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p.10.
55 Telegram from the White House Situation Room to President Johnson at Camp David. Source Johnson Library, National Security File, Dominican Republic, White House Cable, 4/65–7/65. [Online] Full text available at: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v32/d21 [Accessed May 8, 2014].
56 Somoza and the Legacy of US Involvement in Central America. p.306.
57 Robert Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990. (New York: Free Press, 1996), p.124.
58 William LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p.100.
59 Christopher M. Gacek, The Logic of Force (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) p.252.
60 Richard Sobel, “A Report: Public Opinion About United States Intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 53(1) (Spring 1989), p.116.
61 Reagan beat Carter by 489 to 49 votes in the Electoral College and 50.7 percent to 41 percent in the popular vote. Full result available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1980.
62 Alexander M. Haig, Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p.31.
63 For a discussion of the intellectual climate around the need for public support and how that was influenced by the US experience in Vietnam, see pp.180–82.
64 Stephen Knott and Russell L. Riley. [2002]. The Reagan Oral History Project, Caspar Weinberger, Tape 2 of 4, “Interview with Caspar Weinberger,” 19 November 2002, Miller Center of Public Affairs. [Online]. Available at: http://web1.millercenter.org/poh/transcripts/ohp_2002_1119_weinberger.pdf [Accessed June 13, 2007].
65 Knott and Riley 2002.
66 Norman Podhoretz, 1983. “Military Intervention in Nicaragua?” New York Times. Published July 24. Full text available at: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/02/21/specials/podhoretz-central.html.
67 Richard Sobel, “The Polls (A Report). Public Opinion about United States Intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 53(1) (1989), pp.114–28. These particular numbers were taken from a poll conducted in May 1983, the sample for the poll was 1,501, the exact question asked was, “Should the US be involved in trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua? Or not?” The highest percentage in support of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government recorded using this question was 29 percent when asked in August 1987.
68 William M. Leogrande and Philip Brenner, “The House Divided: Ideological Polarization over Aid to the Nicaraguan ‘Contras,’” Legislative Studies Quarterly [online], 18(1) (February 1993), p.110. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/440028 [Accessed June 14, 2007].
69 Leogrande and Brenner 1993, p.112.
70 For a detailed discussion of this relationship see: Roy Gutman, Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua, 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), chapter 1.
71 Anti-government rebels were generally known as “Contras,” an abbreviation of the Spanish la contrarrevolución.
72 This account of the mining fiasco is taken from: Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987, pp.387–96.
73 In a series of polls conducted by the Harris Polling Organization between October 1984 and July 1987, never less than 51 percent of respondents opposed the sending of aid to the Contras. The highest figure for opposition was 74 percent in a poll conducted in June 1987. The mean average opposition to Contra aid taken from all these polls was 62.7 percent. See Richard Sobel, “A Report: Public Opinion About United States Intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 53(1) (Spring 1989), p.124.
74 Roy Gutman, Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua, 1981–1987 (London: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p.89.
75 A finding refers to a document signed by the President which gives the CIA authority to undertake a specific operation. These findings must be reported to the Congressional intelligence committees within 30 days of being signed.
76 President R. Reagan. (1986). Address to the Nation on the Situation in Nicaragua. March 16th 1986. The Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. [Online]. Available at: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1987/061287d.htm. [Accessed September 12, 2007].
77 A Twilight Struggle, p.206.
78 Kagan 1996, p.202.
79 Our Own Backyard, p.286.
80 In a series of polls conducted for ABC News/The Washington Post between November 1983 and March 1986, in a response to the question, Would you say that the situation in Nicaragua is a threat to the security of the United States or not? (Is that a major threat or a minor threat?), never less than 51 percent said that the situation posed a minor or no threat. The highest response rate for minor or no threat was 65 percent in March 1986. The average response for no or minor threat was 58.4 percent of all respondents. See “A Report: Public Opinion About United States Intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua,” p.121.
81 Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p.313.
82 President R. Reagan. (1986). Address to the Nation on the Situation in Nicaragua. March 16th 1986. The Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. [Online]. Available at: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1987/061287d.htm [Accessed September 14, 2007].
83 A majority of Americans in polls conducted between 1983 and 1986 by ABC Television and the Washington Post, 50–55 percent of respondents said that the greatest danger to the United States “lay in the United States becoming too entangled in internal Central American problems as a result of trying to stop the spread of communism.” “A Report: Public Opinion About United States Intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua,” p.116.
84 Nicaragua Options Paper, January 15th, 1985. Full text available at: http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/marketing/index.jsp, with valid username and password.
85 For an account of the diplomacy surrounding Soviet arms deliveries to Nicaragua see: Alexander Haig, Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p.109, and George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), pp.424–5.
86 The Logic of Force, p.265.