Grenada paid for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam

 

• In what context did the U.S. invasion of Grenada take place
30 years ago? What similarities exist with the current U.S. position?

By Dalia González Delgado

WHAT could lead the most powerful country in the world to invade a nation of only 110,000 inhabitants? Three decades ago, some 7,000 U.S. marines and parachutists occupied Grenada, in an operation labeled Urgent Fury. The capital of this Caribbean island was bombarded by aircraft, helicopters and warships.

Maurice Bishop in 1980
(FOTO:ARCHIVO)

The United Nations condemned the aggression. Ronald Reagan, who occupied the White House at the time, responded, "100 nations in the United Nations have not agreed with us on just about everything that's come before them where we are involved, and it didn't upset my breakfast at all."

This was the same President who when asked about the possibility of invading Nicaragua in 1986 said, " You're looking at an individual that is the last one in the world that would ever want to put American troops into Latin America, because the memory of the Great Colossus of the North is so widespread in Latin America, we'd lose all our friends if we did anything of that kind."

The events of October 1983 took place within the framework of an effort by Reagan, elected in 1981, to reestablish what in the view of neoconservatives was "the needed recovery of the U.S. military's ability to coerce," according to Cuban political scientist and researcher Dr. Carlos Alzugaray.

Some 7,000 U.S. marines and
parachutists invaded Grenada
October 25, 1983

"In the perception of this group, there existed what they described as a growing danger, evidenced by revolutions in Iran, Nicaragua and Grenada; Cuba's support to struggles in Angola and Ethiopia; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and other international events," the expert told Granma.

"They believed that all of this was due to the weak image projected by the United States after the defeat in Vietnam and the policy they described as pacifist which President Carter had implemented: a canal agreement with Panama, tolerance of the Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan support for revolutions in Central America, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Palestine, a pacifist policy in Europe, to give just a few examples."

Thus the current debate about the relative loss of power on the part of the United States - exacerbated by developments in Syria - has a precedent in the 1970's. 1979, when Maurice Bishop and his revolutionary New Jewel Movement came to power, was also the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. This was compounded by a decade of economic crisis.

The U.S. needed a show of force to make clear that the country still had the resources, and the will, to protect its strategic interests wherever they might be challenged, Alzugaray said.

"The Caribbean Basin was, for many, the perfect site, a location in which the relationship of forces favored the U.S. given the closeness and overwhelming military advantage.

"Both Nicaragua and Grenada were considered vulnerable," Alzugaray continued, "but different strategies were followed in the two countries: a covert war against the first, with support to reactionary regimes in the area, and an open invasion of the latter, once propitious conditions existed."

Grenada's revolutionary process fell victim to internal contradictions. The new government had disarmed the police, created a Popular Assembly with representation and participation by all social layers; began the redistribution of land; supported access to health care and education. More than 2,500 people had learned to read and write by 1981. Nevertheless, one segment of the leadership questioned Bishop's politics and demanded more radical positions. This led to his destitution, arrest and assassination on October 19, 1983. These were the conditions under which the U.S. mounted the invasion.

The most powerful country in the world is today experiencing the erosion of its hegemony. When faced with a similar situation in the past, the U.S reacted by attacking a small country. How might it respond today?

There were and are two possible reactions, then and now, said Ernesto Domínguez, from the University of Havana's Center for Hemispheric and U.S. Studies (CEHSEU), speaking with Granma: "Assume the decline and attempt to manage it in such a way to preserve a privileged position, or try to detain the process by resorting to the use of force, with several concrete objectives, such as giving a show of power, reaffirming geo-strategic positions, controlling key resources or stimulating the economy with military spending."

However, Dr. Domínguez commented that there are important differences between that historical moment and the present. "In the first place, at that time we were still in the middle of the bi-polarism of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. This added a factor which does not currently exist, one of an identified rival with which to compete, and a relationship of understandable confrontation-equilibrium," the professor asserted.

"At that time the decline was more apparent than real, given that the rival in question was in the process of internal disintegration which was not evident until a few years later, but which was already having serious effects, while the United States was far from this. The movements in Latin America and the Third World in general were strongly connected to the USSR in many ways.

"Currently, the relative decline appears more real, since multi-polarity is an emerging process, albeit with still a long way to go. Latin American movements do not depend on a socialist camp or on a power counterpoised to the United States. The current leftist and revolutionary movements have their roots more openly and solidly established in national and regional realities and contradictions, and they themselves are attempting to construct alternatives of integration," Alzugaray said.

 

October 31, 2013

 

Granma.cu

 

Death of the 20th century General

 

• Given his victories in the field of battle, the legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap was called the Red Napoleon by his enemies, and by his compatriots, Volcano under the Snow

A press report from Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, notes that the legendary General Vi Nguyen Giap, one of the most eminent figures in Vietnamese history and a great friend of Cuba and revolutionary causes, died at the age of 102 on October 4.

Ge Luo means Volcano under the Snow; the name given by his compatriots to this exceptional man, who defeated the Japanese, then the French at Dien Bien Phu and, decades later, forced the U.S. army to flee from Saigon, thus completing the reunification of Vietnam.

His life is indissolubly linked to the struggle for national liberation, to the history of the training, growth and development of the Vietnam People’s Army.  For his victories the French themselves nicknamed him the Red Napoleon.

Vo Nguyen Giap was one of so many sons and daughters of campesinos who became figures thanks to socialism, not without much personal sacrifice.  In 1926 he became a member of student organizations involved in the underground struggle.  He joined the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and quickly grew close Ho Chi Minh, a personal friend.

At the end of 1941, Giap left for the Vietnamese mountains in order to create the first guerrilla groups.  There he established an alliance with Chu Van Tan, the leader of Tho, one of the fighting formations created by a national minority in northeast Vietnam.  At Christmas 1944 he captured a French military post, after having trained the first battalions of his armed forces.

By the middle of 1945 he already had 10,000 men under his command, and could move onto the offensive against the Japanese, who had invaded the country.

The French police arrested his wife and sister-in-law, using them as hostages to put pressure on Giap and force him to surrender.  The repression was ferocious: his sister-in-law was guillotined and his wife sentenced to life imprisonment.  She died in prison after three years as a result of torture.  The French also killed his newborn son, his father, his two sisters and other family members.

But Giap was resolute.  He defeated the French during the Dien Bien Phu campaign, which was the first great victory of a colonized and feudal people, with a primitive agricultural economy, against an experienced imperialist army sustained by a vigorous and modern military industry.  The most eminent French generals (Leclerc, De Lattre de Tasigny, Juin, Ely, Sulan, Naverre) failed one after the other facing troops who were poor campesinos, but determined to fight to the death for their country and for socialism.  Vietnam was divided and Giap was appointed Minister of Defense of the new government of North Vietnam which, while the people’s war continued, made every effort to build a new socialist society.

As the Commander of the new people’s army, Giap led the struggle in the Vietnam War against the U.S. invaders in the south of the country, a struggle which, once again, began as a guerilla war.  The first U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam when, on July 8, 1959, the Vietcong attacked a military base at Bien Hoa, northeast of Saigon.

Four U.S. presidents, one after another, fought against Vietnam, leaving behind a bloody trail of 57,690 dead American troops.  In 1975 the country was reunified, when a tank of the revolutionary army charged the protective barrier of the U.S. embassy, while the last imperialists fled precipitously in a helicopter from the roof of the building.

General Giap was not only a maestro in the art of directing revolutionary warfare, but also wrote a number of valuable books about it, such as his famous work People’s War, People’s Army, a manual on guerilla war based on his own experience.  In the manual, he established three basic fundamentals which a people’s army must possess to attain victory in the struggle against imperialism: leadership, organization and strategy.  The leadership of the Communist Party, an ironclad military discipline and a political line adapted to the country’s economic, social and political conditions.

He defined the people’s war as "a war of combat for the people and by the people, while the war of guerrillas is simply a method of combat.  The people’s war is a more general concept.  It is a synthesized concept.  It is simultaneously military, economic and political."  The people’s war is not just made by an army, however popular this might be, but is one made by all the people because it is impossible for a revolutionary army, alone, to achieve victory against reaction.  All of the people have to participate and help in a struggle, which necessarily, must be prolonged."

As a good guerrilla fighter, Giap knew that military success, when there is such a large disproportion of forces, is based on initiative, audacity and surprise, which demands that a revolutionary army has to constantly displace itself.  He stood out as a genius of logistics, capable of constantly mobilizing troop contingents, following the principles of the war of movement.  He acted in this way against the French colonialists in 1951, infiltrating an entire army across enemy lines in the Mekong Delta and again by bringing forward the Tet offensive in 1968 against the U.S. forces, when he placed thousands of men and tons of provisions for a simultaneous attack on 35 strategic centers in the south.

Both his followers and adversaries considered Vo Nguyen Giap as one of the great military strategists of history.

Marcel Bigeard, the most decorated general in the French army, who was his prisoner, has said of the Vietnamese military chief: "Giap victoriously commanded his troops during more than 30 years.  This constitutes an unprecedented feat (...) He extracted lessons from his errors and never repeated them"

William Westmoreland, commander in chief of the U.S. army in Vietnam and an adversary of Giap, stated that the qualities which make a great military chief are the aptitude to make decisions, moral strength, capacity for concentration, without forgetting the intelligence which unifies all of the foregoing.  Giap possessed them all.  (SE)

October 09, 2013

 

Granma.cu