Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

Cons — Had no idea that the United States could actually invade a country.

In 1983, American soldiers were patrolling Beirut in a futile effort to establish democracy in Lebanon while desperately trying to fend off Syrian control of the Islamic militias. Nu­clear missiles were being delivered to Western Europe to counter the thousands of Russian missiles already in place. The Contras were being funded to battle the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the CIA was funding the mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Cold War was pretty damn hot.

Also that year the secret micro-Marxist party running Grenada was bubbling with dissent. Cuba had indeed sup­plied hundreds of engineers to build a giant runway, but island strongman Maurice Bishop’s main partner in the gov­ernment, Bernard Coard, wasn’t happy.

Coard, the party’s treasury secretary, had studied econom­ics at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and at Sussex University in Britain and had somehow, inexplicably, man­aged to turn himself into an ardent Marxist hard-liner. Per­haps jealous of Bishop’s power, Coard accused Bishop of betraying the revolution, despite the obvious evidence of the giant airstrip being slowly built by the Cuban engineers and the piles of weapons delivered by the Cubans and Russians.

As the money man, Coard knew that the revolution wasn’t going well. The 100,000-person island nation was having trouble paying its bills, perhaps because turning it into a tiny version of such giant, failing states as Cuba and Russia was working all too well. Other than the production of nutmeg and some tourism, the one bright spot for the regime was St. George’s Medical School, which paid the government a lot of rent. But for a government trying to foment Marxist revolu­tion, relying on a couple of hundred B-level American medical students for funding was embarrassing. One thing everyone understood, however, including Bishop and Coard, was that you didn’t mess with the American meal tickets.

The unhappy Coard finally confronted Bishop and bullied him into sharing power. But while he was on a trip, Bishop called Coard from Havana and reneged on the deal. When Bishop returned, Coard placed him under house arrest, which was easy enough because Bishop happened to live right down the street from Coard, on a sort of a Revolution­ary Row of Grenada. When word of Bishop’s arrest got out, most Grenadans, blissfully ignorant of the intraparty squab­bling, were angry that the widely admired Bishop had been pushed out by Coard in the name of the “Communist revolu­tion.” Most Grenadans still didn’t realize Bishop was a Com­munist or that any such revolution had taken place. Marches spontaneously began to happen; shops began to close; Fidel weighed in, and he wasn’t happy. For five days the situation festered as Coard tried to force Bishop’s ouster down his throat. He didn’t accept. Realizing that he wasn’t as popular as Bishop, Coard hid.

On October 19, a large crowd marched up the hill, past Coard’s house, brushing past the armored personnel carriers (APCs) manned by soldiers who fired in the air to scare away the demonstrators. Undeterred, the crowd rescued Bishop. Coard watched from his living room window as the exultant swarm swept Bishop past his house again. The rescuing crowd carried Bishop into Fort Rupert, the army headquar­ters, on the other side of town.

At this point it was a standoff. Bishop, still getting his bearings after six days of house arrest, didn’t move to arrest Coard. Concluding that since the soldiers hadn’t fired on the crowd, he controlled the streets and the situation, he relaxed. But Coard grabbed the initiative and went after Bishop.

Under Coard’s orders, three APCs drove over to Fort Rupert, pushing through confused crowds that thought the vehicles supported Bishop. Coard’s hastily conceived plan was to make it look like Bishop had thrown a coup and was killed while the government was retaking the headquarters. This would make it more palatable to the citizens who were solidly behind Bishop. It would, of course, just confuse those citizens who asked how the head of the government could coup himself. But no plan is perfect.

When the soldiers arrived at the fort, they machine-gunned the crowd in front, killing dozens, and stormed inside. Bishop was easily captured but refused to die fighting. After checking back with Coard, the army lined Bishop and seven others up against the wall and shot them. Coard had gradu­ated to Stalinist first class.

Coard, who had declined to witness the executions, formed a new government called the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC). Their first official duties were to implement martial law and a curfew, creating great hardship in a coun­try where the revolution had not included providing electric­ity or refrigerators for many people. Their second duty was to dispose of the bodies of the former government leaders, a two-day process involving a series of trucks and jeeps, and culminating in burning the decomposing bodies in a pit behind a latrine.

Coard, already proving that his style of leading-by-hiding was brutal but effective, now receded even farther into the background as General Hudson Austin, the army chief, was named the head of the RMC. The next day Austin went to the vice-chancellor of St. George’s Medical School to assure him that the students would not be harmed. Until then the school administrator was totally unaware that any danger existed.

When news arrived in Washington of Bishop’s execution, Reagan’s cadre — always on a hair-trigger alert for any Communist provocation, even against other Communists — stood ready. Col. Oliver North, assisted by Fawn Hall, held the post of deputy on the National Security Council staff with the responsibilities of coordinating the various political and military departments. This role put him in a position to influ­ence the legal decision-making process or to safely cut it out completely, as he later did during the Iran/Contra scandal.

On Grenada, however, North saw an opportunity to work within the system. Initially, the military chiefs were against an invasion of a sovereign country, no matter how small, without a really good reason. The students-who-could-easily-be-hostages concerned them, of course, but there hadn’t been any reports of actual harm to them. The hard-liners, who were convinced that Grenada was poised to become the nexus of a Communist push into Caribbean tourist hot spots, felt that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up. They recommended an invasion.

The Joint Chiefs, despite being rabid anti-Communists to a man, were reluctant to invade a country even if it was Communist (albeit secretly) and could be conquered in about seventeen seconds. There was virtually no intelligence on the size or composition of the enemy they would face on the ground. The CIA intelligence reports roughly went as fol­lows: the beaches were lovely, the drinks icy cold, the Cubans were building a runway, and yes, in fact, there were Ameri­can students-who-could-possibly-be-hostages. The one bright spot was that the island had been discovered to be infested with easily beatable Communists who had wandered into their gun sights.

It was a stalemate at the NSC, but North kept pushing. A request was arranged from the Organization of Eastern Ca­ribbean States (Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, Montserrat, St. Vincent, and Gre­nada) asking for American armed forces to please invade one of their member states. The fact that Grenada was a fully sovereign nation and a member of the British Common­wealth didn’t really matter much.

Over the weekend before the invasion, diplomats from the United States and Britain met in Grenada with RMC leaders and the vice chancellor of the medical school. American offi­cials wanted to get every student out. Evacuating all six hun­dred could not be done by air from the smaller airport in the north, and the larger airport in the south, the new nexus of Communism, was not actually finished, so a commercial jet could not be flown in. A warship was suggested, but the Grenadans didn’t have any (they didn’t have any airplanes either), and they rejected using an American warship as an embarrassment, since it would look like an invasion. Using a cruise liner for the evacuation was posed as an alternative but was never followed through. Essentially, the students had gotten onto the island but could not get off.