Enjoying unusual rapport with his counterparts in Great Britain, France, and West Germany, the president pressed his NATO allies toward greater defense spending of their own and the completion of the GLCM-Pershing II deployment program. He especially endeared himself to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by overruling Secretary of State Alexander Haig in the Falkland Islands crisis of 1982. Risking alienating the Latin American conservatives, Reagan ordered the American military to provide intelligence and logistics support to the British joint task force that recaptured the islands from Argentina. A newly assertive and rearmed U.S. Army and Air Force pushed their European counterparts toward a concept of high-technology deep battle in which all elements of the Warsaw Pact would be attacked simultaneously. NATO accepted “AirLand Battle” doctrine in 1985, impressed with the revival of America’s NATO forces and the implied relief from their own expensive modernization programs. The Europeans also nudged the administration forward on theater nuclear force negotiations and a conventional forces treaty.
The theater or intermediate nuclear weapons negotiations began in November 1981 and ended with a treaty in December 1987 after a predictable series of stops and starts. As in other negotiations with the Soviet Union, the American team, in this case led by the expert and venerable Paul H. Nitze, had to cope with double-dealing in Washington and second-guessing in NATO. The Russians waited for their opponents to self-destruct in the diplomatic sense and sign a treaty that would give the U.S.S.R. advantages it could not win in an arms competition. Reagan, however, placed the Soviets on the immediate defensive by suggesting the total abolition of all intermediate-range nuclear weapons deployed by both the Americans and Russians in Europe. Such a proposal, however, excluded British and French forces—as well as nonmissile-delivery systems—and was vague on how much of the U.S.S.R. actually lay within Europe. The Russians recoiled and fought a delaying action for four years in the hope that the European peace movement would force cancellation of the GLCM and Pershing II deployment program. But the NATO governments persisted and deployed the American systems, and a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, accepted the political-strategic reality that he could not disarm France and Great Britain. Although Nitze himself fell victim to bureaucratic machinations, the ultimate treaty reflected his recommendation to ban all American and Russian short- and medium-range ballistic missiles in Europe. Even more impressive was a provision for on-site inspection of the missiles’ destruction in both the Soviet Union and the United States.
Outside the central strategic relationship with NATO and the Soviet Union, the Reagan administration proved as aggressive as its rhetoric. In Latin America and the Middle East it joined in battle with an assortment of revolutionaries, Soviet-sponsored governments, Iranian Islamic fundamentalists, Filipino rebels, Arab nationalists, terrorists, Lebanese sectarian militias, and African socialist governments. In action the Reagan Doctrine proved a mixed blessing and left a mess for subsequent administrations to clean up. In the broadest sense the war on Communist revolution produced greater relative success in Latin America, the least benefit in the Middle East. In Central America the administration inherited one insurgency in El Salvador and created another in Nicaragua, defining its enemy in both cases as vicious revolutionaries under the spell of Cuba and the Soviet Union. The Sandinista government in Managua, Nicaragua, solidified its power in 1980 and 1981 with hard-core commandantes, most noticeably Daniel Ortega. Nicaraguan resisters fled into Honduras and Costa Rica and looked for aid from the military regimes in Panama and Honduras. The Reagan administration charged to their assistance, either with direct aid and action through the Central Intelligence Agency or via intermediate nations like Panama, Honduras, Argentina, and Israel. At the same time American civilian and military advisers assisted the Salvadoran government, under siege since 1979 from the Frente Marti Liberacion Nacional (FMLN). Newly established American bases in Honduras supported both wars, and the U.S. Army held maneuvers along the Nicaraguan border to intimidate the commandantes.
The American military action in the Middle East did not fall neatly within the Cold War politics of the Western Hemisphere and proved extremely frustrating. Two major regional traumas fused the issues of the security of Israel and the menace of Islamic fundamentalism. Few could match the zeal of the Iranian Shi’a revolutionaries, who were dedicated to overthrowing the Syrian and Jordanian governments by subversion even while they fought off the even more-hated Sunni Iraqi armies directed by Saddam Hussein, the most vicious tyrant in a dangerous region. The war between Iran and Iraq was one reality, and the Iranian sponsorship of terrorist organizations a piece of that war. The other flashpoint was the civil war in Lebanon, which had begun again in 1975; as the Christians, Sunni Arabs, and Druze hill tribes weakened each other, they created a power vacuum for the Palestinian guerrilla movement and Iran-backed terrorists and gangs (known as Hezbollah or “Party of God”) to set up business in Lebanon. Syrian forces shifted west into Lebanon to guard the Beka’a Valley and the Palestinians. In the spring of 1982 the Israeli Defense Force drove into Lebanon against the Palestinians and waged a lightning campaign all the way to Beirut. As part of an international agreement, the United States sent a Marine expeditionary unit (about 2,000 officers and men) to police a ceasefire and expulsion agreement that sent the surviving Palestinians into exile in September 1982.
In less than a month, however, the Marines returned to back American efforts to prevent the collapse of the Lebanese government and army, dominated by the Christians, after terrorists assassinated President Bashir Gemayel. Rival factions correctly determined that the Americans, who could fire only to protect themselves, had actually chosen sides. Druze and Shi’a militia units put the Marines stationed at the Beirut international airport under sporadic fire, which took Marine lives. In August and September 1983 the situation deteriorated rapidly with the withdrawal of the last Israeli forces around Beirut. Swayed by the influence of presidential envoy Robert C. McFarlane, the local American commanders (no one was in complete charge) agreed to discourage the Druze and Shi’as with Lebanese artillery and U.S. Navy shellfire. In the early morning of October 23, 1983, a truck-carried bomb exploded underneath the airport office building holding the Marine ground-force headquarters; in the blast and collapse 241 men died, 239 of them Americans and 220 of them Marines. The disaster caused a crisis within the Reagan administration that eventually led to withdrawal in February 1984.
The battle, however, continued in Lebanon and elsewhere, for the Reagan administration turned to airpower to awe its enemies. The first incident occurred in August 1981, when Navy jets shot down two Libyan interceptors over the Gulf of Sidra, the result of an American initiative to challenge Muammar Gaddafi’s definition of “national” waters and airspace. The second air foray found Navy jets in action against Palestinian terrorists (murderers of a handicapped American Jewish tourist) who had boarded an Egyptian chartered airliner bound for Tunisia. On October 10–11, 1985, Navy F-14s, supported by an Air Force armada of intelligence and refueling aircraft, forced the airliner down on Sicily, and the terrorists passed into the hands of Italian judicial officials.
The terrorist war in the Middle East, however, escalated as various Palestinian and Iranian factions (with European allies) vied for fame and fortune with bombs and guns. Terrorist attacks and hijacking incidents doubled in 1983–1985 and produced 2,000 casualties, half of them Americans. In NSDD 138 (April 1984), the president approved a military and clandestine war on terrorists. In January 1986, convinced that Gaddafi was the most prominent and certainly most vocal of the terrorist sponsors, Reagan ordered increased air operations along the Libyan coast. In April the Navy easily defeated a forlorn attack by Libyan gunboats on a carrier task force, but the terrorists struck back by destroying an airliner bound for Athens and bombing a disco in West Berlin, killing and wounding American soldiers and their friends. Intercepted communications clearly linked the terrorists to Gaddafi, so Reagan ordered a massive air strike by Ai
r Force F-111F bombers and Navy carrier aircraft on high-value political and military targets in Tripoli and Benghazi on either end of the Gulf of Sidra. With the loss of one aircrew (two men), the strike force devastated its Libyan targets, mostly military bases, and caused around 200 casualties. The administration believed it had dampened Gaddafi’s enthusiasm for terrorism and demonstrated that it would not allow the Beirut fiasco to weaken its will.
But this inconclusive use of military force in the Middle East led to cascading complications, some of which contributed to the Reagan administration’s disarray in its second term, but the president could claim at least one unambiguous triumph: the liberation of Grenada in October 1983. An impoverished island jewel of the Lesser Antilles, Grenada had traded British colonial status first for autocracy, then revolutionary socialism under a local demagogue, Maurice Bishop. Unhappy with his personalist rule, his associates slaughtered Bishop and his revolutionary court on October 19 with the tacit approval of their East European and Cuban political and military advisers. Encouraged by the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and the resident Crown governor-general, the Reagan administration ordered a joint amphibious and airborne assault on the island on October 25. Although the United States eventually put 6,000 servicemen on the island, the burden of the six-day campaign, which cost the lives of nineteen Americans and about seventy Cubans and Grenadian soldiers, fell upon five battalions of Marines, rangers, and paratroopers. The Americans fought with scanty intelligence, rules of engagement that inhibited the use of artillery and air support, and helter-skelter planning and interservice coordination. Part of the difficulty was the speed with which the operation developed; another was the high priority placed upon the rescue of several hundred American students attending a medical college on the island. Although the Grenadians rejoiced in their rescue from a police state, the armed forces endured much post hoc criticism of their special operations performance, their communications, and their joint cooperation. The Defense Department’s rough treatment of the media during the affair did not help. No one, however, could fault the ardor and technical skill of the American servicemen in Grenada, for they had performed admirably in a tactical situation of unusual confusion and uncertainty.
The Enemy of My Enemy
As quickly as the national consensus had emerged in the late 1970s for a more militant foreign policy and greater defense spending, the Reagan rearmament stalled in 1986–1987 and tailed off through the presidential election of 1988. Defense authorizations no longer showed real growth but declined by an average of 3 percent a year after 1985. Cash from prior authorization years, however, kept defense outlays around the $290 billion level. Public opinion polls showed that the public now thought that defense spending was too high or about right, not too low. Several domestic political developments combined to force Congress to quit accepting the administration’s projected expenditures on defense. The most ominous problem was the national debt, which doubled between 1980 and 1986, and debt service payments, which tripled in the same period. Even though the administration and Congress cooperated in cutting domestic spending 21 percent, neither had any taste for reducing the retirement and health-entitlement programs that touched the entire electorate or for cutting obvious or hidden subsidies to powerful economic lobbies. In 1985 Congress passed the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, which required a plan to reduce the growing annual deficits or forced mandatory budget cuts. Since the defense budget represented the single largest budget item that could be easily cut, military spending became an obvious target.
These pruning instincts received timely encouragement by a series of revelations in 1981–1986 that the Pentagon and its defense contractors had reached new heights of waste, fraud, and abuse in the procurement process. Defense inspectors, military officers, and media muckrakers discovered toilet seats, coffee pots, and hammers priced at many times their commercial value. Part of the problem was Defense Department accounting, which required that overhead or indirect costs be apportioned to every purchased item, hence creating $430 hammers. Another difficulty was that the military wanted toilet seats and coffee pots that could sustain the stresses of military operational use, no doubt exceeding some reasonable requirements. The major problem, however, was that defense contractors, especially aircraft manufacturers and shipbuilders, wanted to protect themselves from future hard times both by making large profits and by funding plant modernization. As subsequent investigation showed, several prominent defense contractors had crossed the line into illegal profiteering, but Defense management practices had been so regulation-bound and ineffective that the department shared the blame.
The tides of influence in Washington shifted away from the hawks. In the 1986 elections the Republicans lost control of the Senate and thus much of their leverage on behalf of Reagan’s defense program. Internal reforms in congressional procedures tended to work to the benefit of those senators and representatives who wanted a pause in defense spending; rules, deaths, and retirements in the Budget and Armed Services Committees put doubters in power. Moreover, the coldest Cold Warriors around the president began to disappear; by 1987 Weinberger, Lehman, and Perle had left government, and William J. Casey, a true Machiavellian director of the CIA, had died. Congress once again exercised its powers to shape defense policy; for example, it forced the Department of Defense to establish an assistant secretary’s office to supervise special operations and low-intensity conflict policies and established a Special Operations Command (headed by an Army general) to pull together separate service activities. Within the executive branch, subtle shifts of power occurred. At the White House, James A. Baker III, a friend of Vice President George Bush, replaced Donald Regan as chief of staff and formed an alliance with Secretary of State George Shultz, whose job he then assumed in the next administration. The White House–State Department alliance reduced the influence of the Department of Defense, headed after 1987 by Frank Carlucci, an able Washington operative but no political giant. The National Security Council staff under Rear Admiral John Poindexter stumbled toward self-destruction.
The erosion of the White House’s mastery of international security politics at home and abroad stemmed in part from Reagan’s willingness to give his subordinates wide latitude and de facto powers that either skirted the fine line of illegality or crossed it in defiance of congressional injunctions. One limitation was self-imposed: A promise not to trade with terrorists for the lives of hostages or other victims. Yet the administration did exactly that, though too late to save the lives of its CIA station chief in Lebanon or, later, a Marine lieutenant colonel working with the United Nations supervisory team. In 1984 or 1985 the Reagan administration opened secret negotiations with Iranians who claimed to have influence with the Hezbollah terrorists who held nine Westerners (five Americans) kidnapped in Beirut and its environs. These Byzantine contacts opened a conduit of arms sales to the Iranian armed forces, starved for antiair and antitank weapons and spare parts in their war with Iraq. The arms sales, however, did not proceed directly but through a series of middlemen, some with links to Israel, whose interest in aiding Iran could be measured by Iran’s enemies, Iraq and Syria. Whatever weapons that left Israeli stocks could then be replaced from the United States. Impoverished Egypt could provide Iran with Russian weapons from its dated military inventory with Saudi Arabia as the banker; some of these weapons went to Iran, many more to Afghanistan. Although this bit of ordnance legerdemain might have been only unwise and disingenuous, a further complication ran against a direct congressional prohibition: That of arms transfers to the Nicaraguan contras. Managed by Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, an NSC staffer in the confidence of Bill Casey, profits from arms sales to Iran then flowed to the contras—with some large rake-offs by more middlemen, Americans and others. First exposed by the Iranians in 1987, the Iran -contra affair did not produce much law enforcement, but it did put the administration on the defensive.
Unlike the Carter administration, the
Reagan administration did not fall prey to its fears and gaffes, largely because it could see progress in several important commitments in 1986–1988. Relations with the Soviet Union showed the most improvement, largely because the seeds of self-destruction had taken root in the Russian empire. By 1988 the Russians had largely conceded defeat in the Third World and along the rim of the “evil empire.” Gorbachev announced that Russian troops would withdraw from Afghanistan; the Cubans started home from Angola, Ethiopia, and Namibia. Civil unrest in late 1989 shaped nationalist politics in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, which overthrew their Communist regimes. The Romanian Communist regime then collapsed in bloody counterrevolution, and no Russian troops rushed to save that government or any other. Outside the Soviet orbit separatism began to divide Yugoslavia into warring republics of mixed ethnic and religious allegiances. Police states of greater or lesser viciousness faded away in the Philippines, South Korea, Haiti, Chile, and South Africa. After some dissembling the Soviets announced a unilateral reduction of their Warsaw Pact forces and took greater interest in the conventional arms reduction talks for NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the Russians seemed prepared to trade off their own divisions for NATO reductions on a surprising 5:1 ratio. Despite ups and downs, the war against the FMLN in El Salvador showed some hope, especially after the election in 1984 of a legitimate civilian president, Jose Napoleon Duarte. In Nicaragua anti-Sandinista sentiment rose, some attracted to contra guerrilla warfare, more dismayed by the commandantes’ wretched economic management.
The Middle East situation proved the most intractable in the waning days of the Reagan administration, but the president did not shy from additional military action. The Israeli connection worsened since hard-liners refused to negotiate with any Palestinian group, domestic or in exile, and a program of settlement (spurred by Jewish immigrants from Russia) marched into the “occupied territories” west of the Jordan River. The Palestinians, however, struck back with the intifada, a civil insurgency that confounded the Israeli police and army. Syria, however, limited its own intervention to exercising influence in Lebanon, where the Muslims slowly grasped power. The United States tried to keep the situation stable with accelerating economic and military assistance to Israel and even greater commitments to Egypt. It also supported UN resolutions demanding that Israel not annex territory it had held since 1967 and that it negotiate some peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem.
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