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Tomgram: Grandin on Rumsfeld's Latin American Wild West Show

[Note for Tomdispatch readers: I'll be on the road much of this week; so I may be slow to, or even briefly unable to, answer site emails. Please be patient. Your letters by turns, fascinate and surprise -- and are much appreciated. Tom]

I know it goes against the grain of the Internet where everyone is supposed to have the attention span of a gnat, but Tomdispatch doesn't hesitate to run its pieces long. Maybe that's because sometimes, to frame our world intelligently, length is a necessity; and then again, there's just the pleasure (for me at least) of seeing an agile mind at work making connections for the rest of us. In the case of historian Greg Grandin, who writes on Latin America for the Nation magazine among other publications, the connections are unending -- and, in the end, chilling indeed.

Grandin's latest piece offers us all a vision of Donald Rumsfeld's "Wild West" in Latin America; or, put another way, how to potentially mess up a second region of the world as we are presently so intent on doing in the Middle East. Plunge in. It's well worth the odyssey he takes you on into the strategic brain of the Pentagon and the "lawless" world of Latin America's tri-border area.

Then check out his new book, Empire's Workshop. It's a history of how American imperial power, soft and hard, was first tested out and honed south of our border. More important, though, it's the necessary, almost forgotten history of how, in the early 1980s, American conservatism became an internationalist, expansionist movement -- without which our recent history in Iraq and elsewhere makes a lot less sense.

It was in Central America, remember, that President Ronald Reagan first actively faced off against the "Evil Empire." It was through Central American policy that the previously distinct strands of conservatism and neoconservatism first broke foreign bread (and foreign heads) together. It was the crucible upon which the ideas and constituencies that drive Bush's aggressive foreign policy today were first hammered out. It was the place that secular neocons and anti-communist militarists came together with the Christian New Right to oppose Catholicism's Liberation Theology, the radical Islam of its moment -- at a time when Reagan's CIA director was playing footsy in Afghanistan and elsewhere with the Islamic jihadists who would later be melded with the "axis of evil" into the War on Terror.

Central America was also where Republicans first embraced the idealist language of spreading "democracy" abroad as a key justification for an aggressive, violent, preemptive foreign policy. It was in relation to Central America that, through the Office of Public Diplomacy, the executive branch first used a full range of PR "perception management" techniques to sell a war -- again anticipating the media manipulation that led to the invasion of Iraq. Finally, it was in what became the Iran-Contra scandal that Republicans first tried to bypass many of the restrictions on the presidency put into place (however feebly) after Vietnam and Watergate, foreshadowing the vast, half-secret expansion of executive powers in the last five years. Not for nothing did so many of the current administration's officials and hangers on -- John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, Donald Kagan, Michael Ledeen, even John Bolton -- come out of Central America. It is a story that must be read, as must Grandin's piece on U.S. war-planning in recalcitrant Latin America. Tom

posted by Annamarie at 7:06 PM