When one discusses US intervention in the 3rd World between 1947 and 1989, it is imperative to examine official US records before spouting off nonsense about the Soviet Union. Particularly revealing was the logic revealed by Henry Kissinger for the US-backed coup on 9/11/73 in Chile. He said "Allende was elected legally, the first Marxist government ever to come to power by free elections. The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on-and even precedent value for-other parts of the world." Nixon expanded that "our main concern in Chile is the prospect that he [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success." In fact the CIA explicitly demonstrated to the President and to Kissinger before such statements were issued that Allende was no favorite of Castro or the Soviet Union and that he would be "hard for the Communist Party and for Moscow to control." But the CIA backed the coup, which set up decades of torture in Chile via the installation of Augusto Pinochet, one of the single greatest mass murderers in the Western Hemisphere in the post-WW2 era.
That Kissinger/Nixon logic was neither innovative nor unique in the Executive Branch, and it wouldn't be the last time it was used. The logic has a technical name in political science: The Threat of a Good Example. The US does not want what Kissinger referred to as an "independent, rational socialist state" providing a good example for the rest of the 3rd world. That's why the US was involved in Greece in 1947, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, South Vietnam in 1962, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia and the Dominican Republic in 1965, etc etc.
Grenada was the same, as was Nicaragua at the same time. The US did not want independent development models proving themselves successful to the rest of the world. Some here have made comments about the Cuban involvement in Grenada. No one mentioned, however, that the Cubans who were killed in Grenada were nothing more than several dozen paramilitary construction workers who were attacked by over six thousand American troops. Also unmentioned was the fact that the Cubans said they would only fire on the Americans if they were attacked first, which they were. The Cubans had also announced that they were willing to negotiate the whole issue (namely referring that they were willing to concede American control of a hospital which had some American med-school students there at the time). The US refused and proceeded as planned. That's a typical example, and since we're talking about the Reagan years, none was made clearer than the case of
Nicaragua. Bottom line, the reasons given by the US administrations for these actions were, from the first upper case letter to the last punctuation, sheer fraud.
To quote the late Howard Zinn, "the real reason for the invasion [of Grenada] one high American official told [Bernard] Gwertzman, was that the United States should show (determined to overcome the sense of defeat in Vietnam) that it was a truly powerful nation: "What good are maneuvers and shows of force, if you never use it?""
