[Reagan] should be remembered as the prototype of the vacuous "nice guy" who pursued vile, reactionary policies. Of course, we now have the production model.
That's really very appropro.
Many members of the Oaf of Office's coterie of slimeballs were also players in Reagan's administration: Poppy was VP; Rumsfeld was Special Envoy to the Middle East (making deals with Saddam) and Senior Advisor to Reagan's Panel on Strategic Systems; U.S. Air Force General Counsel, Mary L. Walker (who helped prepare the green-light-to-torture in Iraq document) was appointed to the Department of Justice under Reagan, Paul Bremer was ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism; Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; John Negroponte was involved in human rights scandals in Honduras and in Reagan's Iran-Contra crimes; Elliott Abrams was Ass't Secretary of State.
Okay, that's enough. On to the story...
The same attitude of might makes right and revenge psychosis that existed in the Reagan administration has simply grown to its full height in the Bubbleboy White House. They just grew more arrogant, and more reckless. Iraq is Bubbleboy's Grenada supersized.
Here's Stan Goff's account of the invasion of Grenada. (Haven't forgotten that one, have you?)
In 1983, I took part in the invasion of Grenada. Aside from being an incompetent operation, it was also one that no one in the United States even knew about until it was pretty much over. Hey, it doesn't take longer to conquer a nation that is a ten-mile-wide island with fewer than ninety thousand people...even if it was planned by idiots.
When America was informed that its treasure and youth were being risked to secure the global nutmeg supply, over ninety-nine percent of the country couldn't tell you where Grenada was. We who conducted the operation had committed it to memory less than forty hours earlier.
The invasion was ordered in part to take advantage of internal turmoil in Grenada to install a new pro-U.S. government. Mainly, however, its aim was to flex a little American muscle after 258 Marines were killed by a car bomb only days earlier in Beirut, whereupon the U.S. expeditionary force in Lebanon was unceremoniously withdrawn.
Like a bully that gets his tail kicked, Reagan & Co. had to beat down someone smaller to save face.
The whole thing suddenly became a "rescue mission" when someone stumbled over a low-rent offshore medical-diploma mill full of American students and Reagan's staff cranked up the propaganda machine. Let me explain this carefully. None of us involved in Operation Urgent Fury (not joking; it was called that) had heard anything about medical students. I was with Delta Force, the highest priority unit in the United States Army, and the designated drivers for "rescue" operations, and we had never heard of a medical school. Bonzo lied, just like his simian cousin Dubya would lie two decades later.
Full Spectrum Disorder - Stan Goff, U.S. Army (Retired), 2004, Soft Skull Press (p. 82)
When America was informed that its treasure and youth were being risked to secure the global nutmeg supply, over ninety-nine percent of the country couldn't tell you where Grenada was. We who conducted the operation had committed it to memory less than forty hours earlier.
The invasion was ordered in part to take advantage of internal turmoil in Grenada to install a new pro-U.S. government. Mainly, however, its aim was to flex a little American muscle after 258 Marines were killed by a car bomb only days earlier in Beirut, whereupon the U.S. expeditionary force in Lebanon was unceremoniously withdrawn.
Like a bully that gets his tail kicked, Reagan & Co. had to beat down someone smaller to save face.
The whole thing suddenly became a "rescue mission" when someone stumbled over a low-rent offshore medical-diploma mill full of American students and Reagan's staff cranked up the propaganda machine. Let me explain this carefully. None of us involved in Operation Urgent Fury (not joking; it was called that) had heard anything about medical students. I was with Delta Force, the highest priority unit in the United States Army, and the designated drivers for "rescue" operations, and we had never heard of a medical school. Bonzo lied, just like his simian cousin Dubya would lie two decades later.
Full Spectrum Disorder - Stan Goff, U.S. Army (Retired), 2004, Soft Skull Press (p. 82)
Additional appropriate comparison between Bubbleboy and Raygun. From prototype to production model in cowboy diplomacy as well.
And while, I've got Stan here, I'll finish out his story, which he is telling to remind us that the screeching about supporting our troops, and being traitors for protesting the war, is nothing more than right-wing attack tactics.
The first hour of the operation was an old-fashioned country ass-whuppin', with us on the receiving end.
We were forced to defend ourselves, or rather, face a determined initial defense against our little invasion. But we didn't have the "support" spirit of the American people, because as far as they knew, we were all still home, cheating on our spouses in Fayetteville, North Carolina. America woke up scratching its head, trying to figure out why Ronald Reagan had just invaded a Spanish city named after a Ford compact.
When the helicopter I was riding on with sixteen other people reached the island, we were greeted with small-arms fire before we even crossed over the first mangrove swamp, and it got worse fast. By the time we reached our "target," Richmond Hill Prison, where we were going to "liberate" prisoners that weren't there, we already had four people shot. As we hovered over the prison, deciding whether or not to slide down ropes into Grenada's drunk tank, machine-gun fire poured through both doors and stitched up the belly of the fuselage from below. By the time we left, having decided not to put up with this any longer, seven members of our group were shot, and most of the rest of us were having our clothes shot off.
In all this mayhem and confusion, while we (the army's most elite, whitest forces) were being spanked by skinny Black folk from Grenada and equally dark Cuban construction workers, I can honestly say that I didn't give a flying fuck about what anyone in the United States might be thinking, or how much supportive spirit they might be psychically channeling my way to cuddle up against.
I didn't stop to consider that many of my countrymen and countrywomen made jokes about our commander in chief once co-starring with a chimpanzee, or how that might seem....unsupportive.
I was extremely busy using a K-bar knife to cut the jammed harness off a wounded door gunner to lay his pale, shocky ass on the helicopter floor while I commandeered his portside machine gun to suppress some of our most persistent assailants across the valley.
Nothing I did would have changed one iota, even had the entire population of the United States gathered naked at Stonehenge to chant supportive mantras out across the bounding seas to our precise geographic coordinates.
I can say now that we were wrong, but once engaged the goal is to keep breathing. For that, no one needs invisible cheerleaders.
During Bush's invasion of Iraq, nothing we did or didn't do here had any impact on how the troops comported themselves in Iraq either. the support-the-troops thing is a mystifying old red herring. What our new fascists really wanted us to do was shut the fuck up. And shutting up was exactly what we refused to do.
That doesn't mean protests didn't have an impact on the war. They very much did, and should have. But it didn't change the ability of a single troop to fight. Only the neocons' mad overreaching and Rumsfeld's simple-minded reorganization of the military have been able to destroy the morale of U.S. troops.
We were forced to defend ourselves, or rather, face a determined initial defense against our little invasion. But we didn't have the "support" spirit of the American people, because as far as they knew, we were all still home, cheating on our spouses in Fayetteville, North Carolina. America woke up scratching its head, trying to figure out why Ronald Reagan had just invaded a Spanish city named after a Ford compact.
When the helicopter I was riding on with sixteen other people reached the island, we were greeted with small-arms fire before we even crossed over the first mangrove swamp, and it got worse fast. By the time we reached our "target," Richmond Hill Prison, where we were going to "liberate" prisoners that weren't there, we already had four people shot. As we hovered over the prison, deciding whether or not to slide down ropes into Grenada's drunk tank, machine-gun fire poured through both doors and stitched up the belly of the fuselage from below. By the time we left, having decided not to put up with this any longer, seven members of our group were shot, and most of the rest of us were having our clothes shot off.
In all this mayhem and confusion, while we (the army's most elite, whitest forces) were being spanked by skinny Black folk from Grenada and equally dark Cuban construction workers, I can honestly say that I didn't give a flying fuck about what anyone in the United States might be thinking, or how much supportive spirit they might be psychically channeling my way to cuddle up against.
I didn't stop to consider that many of my countrymen and countrywomen made jokes about our commander in chief once co-starring with a chimpanzee, or how that might seem....unsupportive.
I was extremely busy using a K-bar knife to cut the jammed harness off a wounded door gunner to lay his pale, shocky ass on the helicopter floor while I commandeered his portside machine gun to suppress some of our most persistent assailants across the valley.
Nothing I did would have changed one iota, even had the entire population of the United States gathered naked at Stonehenge to chant supportive mantras out across the bounding seas to our precise geographic coordinates.
I can say now that we were wrong, but once engaged the goal is to keep breathing. For that, no one needs invisible cheerleaders.
During Bush's invasion of Iraq, nothing we did or didn't do here had any impact on how the troops comported themselves in Iraq either. the support-the-troops thing is a mystifying old red herring. What our new fascists really wanted us to do was shut the fuck up. And shutting up was exactly what we refused to do.
That doesn't mean protests didn't have an impact on the war. They very much did, and should have. But it didn't change the ability of a single troop to fight. Only the neocons' mad overreaching and Rumsfeld's simple-minded reorganization of the military have been able to destroy the morale of U.S. troops.
Stan Goff has a son serving in Iraq and is active with organizations such as Bring Them Home Now! He writes numerous articles and has written two books: Hideous Dream and Full Spectrum Disorder. I've linked to his work before, and I probably will again. And, if you haven't read his Open Letter to GIs in Iraq (Hold on to Your Humanity), please do.
I am also reminded of another ex-Special Forces soldier I know who served in Viet Nam who has been active against this war saying that one of the reasons he protests and does everything he can to get the truth out is that when he was involved in the horrors of his tour in Viet Nam, he just kept hoping and praying that somebody back in the States would find out what was really going on.
Now, back to work. Let's get this war ended for real.
 Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti |  Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century |
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