The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Among the casualties were at least twenty-one mental patients killed in a misguided bombing attack on their hospital. General Edward Trobaugh, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, told reporters that the Grenadan People’s Revolutionary Army had been inept but that the small contingent of Cubans on the island, many of whom were there to build an airstrip, had fought well. He informed visiting congressmen that there was no indication that the medical students had ever been threatened. Reagan criticized the press for labeling the action an “invasion” when it was really a “rescue mission.”45

  In his address to the American people, Reagan emphasized the threat to U.S. security, pointing to “a warehouse of military equipment [that] contained weapons and ammunition stacked almost to the ceiling, enough to supply thousands of terrorists.” Reagan dispelled the notion that Grenada was an idyllic tropical escape: “Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn’t. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy.” “We got there just in time,” he asserted, one step ahead of catastrophe.46

  Afterward Reagan proudly announced, “Our days of weakness are over. Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall.”47 Even the sting of humiliation in Vietnam had been alleviated. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, he claimed, had been “denied permission to win.” “We didn’t lose the war,” he insisted. “When the war was all over and we’d come home—that’s when the war was lost.” In December 1988, a National Defense Commission report concluded, “Our failure in Vietnam still casts a shadow over U.S. intervention anywhere.”48

  The U.S. attempt to avenge the killing of marines in Lebanon was badly bungled. Casey worked closely with the Saudis to assassinate the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, exploding a massive car bomb outside his residence in 1985. Eighty people died and two hundred were wounded, but Fadlallah escaped unharmed.49

  While running roughshod over Central America and the Caribbean, Reagan also trampled the United States’ working class and poor, who were sacrificed to the exigencies of a massive military buildup, which was cheered on by the more than fifty members of the Committee on the Present Danger who held official positions. Right after the 1980 election, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had warned that a “defense spending binge” would be “the worst thing that could happen” to the United States.50 Reagan ignored that advice, having campaigned on the fiction that the United States was militarily weak and vulnerable to a Soviet attack, saying “we’re in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.”51

  In late 1983, the United States used instability in Grenada as a pretext to invade the tiny island nation and topple its revolutionary government. In a logistically bungled operation, nineteen U.S. soldiers died, and more than a hundred were wounded. Nine helicopters were lost. Most of the troops were quickly withdrawn.

  Medical students wait to be evacuated during the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Reagan claimed that the invasion was necessary to rescue the endangered students, but the students were actually in little danger. When polled by the dean of the medical school, 90 percent said they wanted to stay.

  Reagan’s scare tactics worked. By 1985, he had increased defense spending by a staggering 51 percent over 1980 expenditures. To finance this, he slashed federal support for discretionary domestic programs by 30 percent, effectively transferring $70 billion from domestic programs to the military.52

  Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum praised Budget Director David Stockman’s adroitness at cutting the budget, “but,” he added, “I also think you’ve been cruel, inhumane and unfair.” Four hundred eight thousand people lost their eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by 1983, and 299,000 saw their benefits cut. Reagan prodded Congress into cutting $2 billion out of the $12 billion food stamp budget and $1 billion from the $3.5 billion budget for school lunches. The budgets for Medicaid, child nutrition, housing, and energy assistance were also pared. Federal funds for cities were cut almost in half.53 While waging war on the poor, Reagan cut the highest income tax rate, which was 70 percent when he took office, to 28 percent by the time he left.

  New and upgraded weapons systems rolled off the assembly lines, including the long-delayed and very costly MX missile program, which moved missiles around loops that hid their precise location, making them largely invulnerable to a Soviet first strike. Reagan knew that the Soviets, whose economy was stagnant, would be hard pressed to keep pace.

  The nuclear arms budget also grew by leaps and bounds. In 1981, George Kennan, the architect of U.S. containment policy, decried the continuing senseless buildup of nuclear weapons: “We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the sea.”54

  Reagan and Bush were anything but helpless in their arms buildup. They rejected the widely held view that nuclear war would lead to mutual destruction and began planning to win such a war—an approach advocated by nuclear extremists like Colin Gray and Keith Payne, who declared in 1980, “The United States should plan to defeat the Soviet Union.” They believed that the United States might lose 20 million citizens in the process. The key to surviving a nuclear attack, they posited, was an effective command-and-control structure to prevent chaos and keep lines of communication open. The military called this “C3”: command, control, and communications.55 Reagan invested heavily to ensure its invulnerability. Perversely, he projected such a war-winning strategy onto the Soviets. He pointed to a massive Soviet civil defense program as proof, even though no such program existed.

  The Pentagon’s master plan for 1984–1988 ranked defense of the Middle East second only to the defense of North America and Western Europe. The plan explained:

  Our principal objectives are to assure continued access to Persian Gulf oil and to prevent the Soviets from acquiring political-military control of the oil directly or through proxies. It is essential that the Soviet Union be confronted with the prospect of a major conflict should it seek to reach oil resources of the Gulf. Whatever the circumstances, we should be prepared to introduce American forces directly into the region should it appear that the security of access to Persian Gulf oil is threatened.56

  To put this into effect, the United States spent a billion dollars modernizing military bases and deployed nuclear-armed cruise missiles to Comiso, Italy, from which they could reach targets throughout the Middle East. It inserted itself into the middle of the Iran-Iraq War. It provided arms to Iran, helping it turn the tide and begin advancing, by mid-1982, toward Basra, Iraq’s second largest city. Administration officials then had a change of heart and decided to do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent an Iranian victory. They did so knowing full well that Iraq was using chemical weapons. On November 1, senior State Department official Jonathan Howe informed Secretary of State Shultz that Iraq was resorting to “almost daily use of CW” against Iran. In December 1983, Reagan sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. The U.S. Embassy reported that Saddam showed “obvious pleasure” at Rumsfeld’s visit and the letter he presented from the president. Rumsfeld assured Saddam that the United States was doing all it could to cut off arms sales to Iran.57

  Rumsfeld returned for a second visit the following March, partly to assure Saddam that the United States’ priority was defeating Iran, not punishing Iraq for using chemical weapons. Howard Teicher, a Reagan administration NSC Iraq expert, later admitted in a sworn court affidavit that the United States had “actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required.” More than
sixty officers at the Defense Intelligence Agency provided combat planning assistance. Teicher reported that Casey used a Chilean company to deliver cluster bombs, which could effectively repel Iran’s human-wave attacks.58 U.S., British, and German arms manufacturers happily supplied Iraq’s growing needs. Under license by the Commerce Committee, U.S. companies shipped several strains of anthrax that were later used in Iraq’s biological weapons program and insecticides that could be used for chemical warfare. The Iraqi military brazenly warned in February 1984, “the invaders should know that for every harmful insect there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it whatever the number and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.”59

  Iran asked for a UN Security Council investigation. Although U.S. intelligence reports confirmed Iran’s charges, the United States remained silent for several more months, before finally criticizing the Iraqi use of chemical warfare in early March. But when Iran proposed a UN resolution condemning Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, U.S. Ambassador Kirkpatrick lobbied other countries to render “no decision.” Upon the Iraqi ambassador’s suggestion, the United States preempted the Iranian measure by getting a Security Council presidential statement in late March opposing the use of chemical weapons but not mentioning Iraq as the guilty party. In November 1984, the United States restored diplomatic relations with Iraq. Not only did the use of chemical warfare persist until the end of the war with Iran, but in late 1987, the Iraqi air force began dropping chemical weapons against Iraq’s own Kurdish citizens, whom the government accused of supporting Iran. The attacks against rebel-controlled villages peaked with the chemical warfare assault on the village of Halabjah in March 1988. Despite widespread outrage in the United States, including from many inside the administration, U.S. intelligence aid to Iraq actually increased in 1988 and, in December 1988, the government authorized a sale to Iraq of $1.5 million in insecticides by Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of the napalm used in Vietnam.

  Infuriated by Iraq’s use of chemical weapons and by U.S. tacit support for such heinous behavior, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had ended the shah’s secret nuclear weapons program when he assumed power in 1979, condemning nuclear weapons as anti-Islamic, reversed course in 1984 and started the program back up again.

  While the United States was strengthening its support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, Reagan continued his bombastic anti-Soviet rhetoric and provocative behavior. In 1983, he urged his audience at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, “to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority . . . [not] to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”60 The United States deployed ground-launched cruise missiles to Great Britain and Pershing II missiles to West Germany in November 1983 and conducted Able Archer 83—a massive military test using nuclear weapons—that same month. By the end of 1983, U.S.-Soviet relations had reached their lowest point in more than two decades. The two nations were conducting proxy wars around the globe, and a real one seemed possible. Some Soviet officials were convinced that a U.S. attack was imminent.

  Bellicose rhetoric frightened the public. The Day After, which was viewed by a huge television audience, and other nuclear-war movies heightened the sense of alarm and helped spark a massive nuclear freeze movement. Psychiatrists reported that children in both the United States and Soviet Union were experiencing an outbreak of nuclear nightmares not seen since the early 1960s.

  Even nuclear weapons designers were not inured against the implications of the rising threat of nuclear war. Physicist Theodore Taylor had an epiphany during his first visit to the Soviet Union. He described the experience to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, whose own probing scholarship had revolutionized the field of nuclear studies:

  Walking in Red Square in Moscow, Taylor saw many young people in wedding parties visiting Lenin’s tomb and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and was impressed by how happy they looked. He experienced a flashback to the night of the birth of one of his children years before when, rather than being with his wife, he was at the Pentagon poring over intelligence data, including aerial photographs of central Moscow, in connection with potential plans for nuclear attack. Standing in Red Square, he began to weep uncontrollably: “It was seeing those happy-looking, specific people, going around, working their way up to the mausoleum. For any human being to contemplate setting off a bomb on top of all this, these people, is insane . . . a symptom of insanity.” He had experienced such feelings before, but now for the first time “I literally set foot in the SU to see what it was that I was doing with all the details filled in.” Before that, Moscow had been no more than “a set of lines at various levels of rads . . . and . . . pressures and calories . . . per square centimeter” that one had to “match” with “the bombs with those numbers.”

  Taylor decided to abandon weapons research and devote himself to more life-affirming research.61

  Despite his bluster, Reagan too feared the possibility of nuclear war, although his knowledge of nuclear weapons was limited. In 1983, he shocked a group of congressmen when he said that bombers and submarines did not carry nuclear weapons. But his profound, gut-level aversion to nuclear weapons was sincere. He repeatedly told stunned advisors that he considered them “evil” and wanted to eradicate them. His fears were shaped, in large part, by his religious convictions, particularly his fascination with Armageddon, the biblical account of the bloody conflagration that ends history and augurs Jesus’s return, which he believed might be coming. He associated it with nuclear war and thought it his responsibility to protect the American people. Bud McFarlane, who served as Reagan’s deputy national security advisor, said, “From the time he adopted the Armageddon thesis, he saw it as a nuclear catastrophe. Well, what do you do about that? Reagan’s answer was that you build a tent or a bubble and protect your country.”62

  Reagan decided to protect the United States from incoming missiles by building a high-tech, futuristic atmospheric shield around the nation. But such a seemingly benign defensive shield was actually a major provocation to the Soviets. Although such a shield, if it worked at all, would have done little to protect against a Soviet first strike, it might have offered a measure of protection against a limited retaliatory attack by a Soviet Union already crippled by a U.S. first strike.

  Reagan also understood how easily a crisis could be provoked. In September 1983, when Soviet military personnel mistakenly took a Korean Air Lines passenger jet that had crossed into Soviet airspace for a spy plane and, after unheeded warnings, shot it down, killing all 269 people on board, including 61 Americans, Reagan railed against “the Korean Air Lines massacre” as an “act of barbarism” and a “crime against humanity.”63 But in his memoirs he drew a different lesson: “If anything, the KAL incident demonstrated how close the world had come to the precipice and how much we needed nuclear arms control: If, as some people speculated, the Soviet pilots simply mistook the airliner for a military plane, what kind of imagination did it take to think of a Soviet military man with his finger close to a nuclear push button making an even more tragic mistake?”64

  His concerns about nuclear war came to the fore again the following month. After watching an advance copy of The Day After, he wrote in his diary: “It has Lawrence, Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me very depressed.”65 The usually unflappable Reagan remained depressed for days.66 His advisors became so concerned that they brought in Weinberger’s Soviet expert, Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security Policy Richard Perle, to talk sense into him.

  Reagan’s concerns didn’t abate, although Perle and others could sometimes manipulate him into defending a nuclear buildup that was at odds with his deeper wishes. It was also during this time, in the fall of 1983, that he was beginning to grasp that Soviet leaders took his bellicose rhetoric and military escalation seriously and fea
red that he was preparing for an attack.

  His diary entry for November 18 was revealing. He worried about the Soviets being “so paranoid about being attacked” that he planned to reassure them that “no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h—l have they got that anyone would want.” He then noted that Shultz would appear on ABC following The Day After, but now he was more concerned about making sure the film didn’t further fuel the already strong public opposition to his nuclear policies: “We know it’s ‘anti-nuke’ propaganda but we’re going to take it over & say it shows why we must keep on doing what we’re doing.” In that same diary entry, he also wrote about “a most sobering experience with Cap. W. & Gen. Vessey in the situation room—a briefing on our complete plan in the event of a nuclear attack.”67

  Reagan later wrote in his memoirs, “Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. In fact, I had difficulty accepting my own conclusion at first.” When he came to office, it didn’t dawn on him that the Soviets could actually fear a U.S. first strike. “But the more experience I had with the Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.”68