Least We Forget

[MM38084]

This was in the Detroit News about Grenada and I really think it says it all.

Grenada: Force solves some things


By Thomas Bray / The Detroit News


Twenty years ago, having recently arrived in Detroit to take up roost as editorial page editor of The Detroit News, my staff and I found ourselves huddled on a Friday afternoon struggling to come up with an idea to fill an editorial space on Sunday.

"How about something on the situation in Grenada?" ventured one of the editorial writers. A claque of Marxist thugs had taken over the government of the tiny Caribbean island and was brutalizing its residents. Cubans were expanding the airfield to ominous proportions. An offshore medical school attended mainly by Americans was under virtual siege.

OK, I said, but what would we recommend? Well, responded the editorial writer, we at least could deplore what was taking place. After pondering that for a few minutes, I countered with a proposal: We should write an editorial deploring the situation, but the headline ought to read something along the following lines: "Invade Grenada."

And so it was done. The editorial appeared on Sunday (underneath a much longer think piece about the deterioration of the Detroit Zoo). On Monday, when I arrived at work, there were pickets outside giving the Vietnam syndrome a noisy workout. "Invade the Detroit News," suggested the placard of one protester.

But on Tuesday, as I drove to work, there were sketchy reports of some sort of American military action taking place in the Caribbean. By mid-morning the White House had confirmed the reports. President Ronald Reagan had ordered American forces into action, mainly on the pretext of protecting the American medical students.

It was hardly a textbook operation. Various military branches, learning they couldn't communicate on their separate radio systems, were using pay phones to call the Pentagon to relay messages to other units. Cuba's so-called contractors were putting up a stiffer fight than the intelligence crowd had anticipated. But by the end of the day, Grenada was mostly in American hands.

Much of the media was aghast at this preemptive strike. But when American medical students were airlifted to safety, many of them were photographed stooping to kiss American soil or otherwise were recorded expressing thanks that Reagan had acted. And at very little cost a major message had been sent: America, which had been on the defensive since its humiliating retreat from Vietnam, was back.

There were obviously many strands to the victory over the Soviet empire in the 1980s. The Reagan economic boom, based on tax cuts and free markets, showed that communism had failed ideologically. America's arms buildup persuaded even the Soviet generals that they couldn't hope to outgun America. But the Grenada operation underlined the fact that the American policy of containment, which had come to be interpreted as a prescription for coexistence with Communism, had been restored to its rightful place as a recipe for eventual political victory.

The Grenada operation was obviously in the works before The Detroit News thought to editorialize in favor of the idea. What's striking, though, is that not a single other newspaper thought to suggest a military solution, despite many editorials of the "deploring" variety. The belief was strongly held among the chattering classes that the use of force never solves anything. It's a belief that lingers today amidst the frustration that Iraq is not yet a fully pacified, fully democratic entity only six months after the American invasion there.

Well (as Ronald Reagan might start by saying), it's true that force doesn't solve everything. And the use of force always involves risk. We will see about Iraq.

But the gloom may be overstated. Defenders of the Bush administration were chortling last week over discovery of a January 1946 essay in Life Magazine by writer John Dos Passos, titled "Americans Are Losing the Peace in Europe." And on the 20th anniversary of the Grenada invasion - followed six years later by the collapse of the Berlin Wall -- it's worth remembering that there are times when force does solve some things.

Least We Forget