1066 ★ CHAPTER 26 The Triumph of Conservatism
television program that unflinchingly depicted the devastation that would be
caused by a nuclear war.
Reagan came into office determined to overturn the “Vietnam syndrome”—
as widespread public reluctance to commit American forces overseas was
called. He sent American troops to the Caribbean island of Grenada to oust a
pro- Cuban government. In 1982, Reagan dispatched marines as a peacekeeping
force to Lebanon, where a civil war raged between the Christian government,
supported by Israeli forces, and Muslim insurgents. But he quickly withdrew
them after a bomb exploded at their barracks, killing 241 Americans. The
public, Reagan realized, would support minor operations like Grenada but
remained unwilling to sustain heavy casualties abroad.
Reagan generally relied on military aid rather than American troops to
pursue his foreign policy objectives. Abandoning the Carter administration’s
emphasis on human rights, Reagan embraced the idea, advanced in 1979 by
neoconservative writer Jeane Kirkpatrick, that the United States should oppose
“totalitarian” communists but assist “authoritarian” noncommunist regimes.
Kirkpatrick became the American ambassador to the United Nations, and the
United States stepped up its alliances with Third World anticommunist dicta-
torships like the governments of Chile and South Africa. The administration
poured in funds to combat insurgencies against the governments of El Salva-
dor and Guatemala, whose armies and associated death squads committed fla-
grant abuses against their own citizens. When El Salvador’s army massacred
hundreds of civilians in the town of El Mozote in 1981, the State Department
denied that the event, widely reported in the press, had taken place.
The Iran- Contra Affair
American involvement in Central America produced the greatest scandal of
Reagan’s presidency, the Iran- Contra affair. In 1984, Congress banned military
aid to the Contras (derived from the Spanish word for “against”) fighting the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which, as noted earlier, had ousted the
American- backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. In 1985, Reagan secretly
authorized the sale of arms to Iran— now involved in a war with its neighbor,
Iraq— in order to secure the release of a number of American hostages held
by Islamic groups in the Middle East. CIA director William Casey and Lieu-
tenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council set up a system
that diverted some of the proceeds to buy military supplies for the Contras in
defiance of the congressional ban. The scheme continued for nearly two years.
In 1987, after a Middle Eastern newspaper leaked the story, Congress held
televised hearings that revealed a pattern of official duplicity and violation of
the law reminiscent of the Nixon era. Eleven members of the administration