@alyssa

Troubles Abroad

The volatile Middle Eastern pot continued to two boil ominously. Israel badly strained its bonds of friendship with the United States by continuing to allow new settlements to be established in the occupied territory of the Jordan River’s West Bank (See map 40.2). Israel further raised the stakes in the Middle East in June 1982 when it invaded neighboring Lebanon, seeking to suppress once and for all the guerilla bases from which Palestinian fighters harrassed beleaguered Israel. The Palestinians were locally subdued, but Lebanon, already pulverized by years of episodic Civil War, was plunged into armed chaos. President Reagan was obliged to send American troops to Lebanon in 1983 as part of an international peacekeeping force, but their presence did not bring peace. A suicide bomber crashed in explosives-laden truck into a United States Marines barracks on October 23, 1983, killing more than 200 Marines. President Reagan soon thereafter withdrew the remaining American troops, while miraculously suffering no political damage from this horrifying and humiliating attack. Mystified Democratic opponents begin to call him the “Teflon president,” to whom nothing hurtful could stick.

Central America, in the United States’ own backyard, also rumbled menacingly. A leftist revolution had opposed the longtime dictator of Nicaragua in 1979. President Carter had tried to two ignored the hotly anti-American rhetoric of the revolutionaries, known as Sandinistas, and to establish a good diplomatic relations with them. But cold warrior Reagan took their rhetoric at face value and hurled back at them some hot language of his own. He accused the Sandinistas of turning their country into a forward base for Soviet and Cuban military penetration of all of Central America. Brandishing photographs taken from highflying spy plains, administration spokespeople cleaned that Nicaraguan leftists were shipping weapons to revolutionary forces in tiny El Salvador, torn by violence since the coup in 1979.

Reagan sent military “advisers” to prop up the pro-American government of El Salvador. He also provided covert aid, including the CIA-engineered mining of harbors, to the rebel contras opposing the anti-American government of Nicaragua. Reagan flexed his military muscles elsewhere in the turbulent Caribbean. In a diplomatic display of American might, in October 1983 he dispatched a heavy-firepower invasion force to the island of Grenada, where the military coup had killed the prime minister and brought Marxists to power. Swiftly overrunning the tiny island and ousting the insurgents, American troops vividly demonstrated Reagan’s determination to assert that dominance of the United States in the Caribbean, just as Theodore Roosevelt had done (See map 40.3).