In the case of flawed PI elections you later referred to, I can only say that the U.S. has yet to figure out how "clean up" a Teamster election.
Nobody was asking the US to clean up the election, only to have the courage to publicly acknowledge that it was filthy.
You have to understand that between that election and the Feb. '86 events, this country was on the brink of civil war, a war in which the only hope for the country, the unarmed moderate opposition, would have vanished in a fight between the armed left and the armed right. You also have to understand that the US has huge influence here, and has since colonial days. After the obviously fraudulent election we had a choice between standing for democracy or standing for fascism, and we chose the former, bringing the country a big step closer to civil war.
The war didn't happen, but it came very close, and we did nothing to try to prevent it.
RR was by no means the only American President to coddle Marcos, this is true. But he was the one on watch when the situation had to be dealt with, and I felt that it was dealt with in a cowardly and disgraceful fashion.
There were two notable exceptions to Cold War policy (aside from the Diem hit, that was hoped to usher in "the moderate opposition" and more effective anti-communists) -- Cuba and Iran.
Are you referring to Iran at the time of the fall of the Shah, or Iran when we gave Mossadegh the boot and put the Shah in?
The Cold War was an epic struggle. Many sacrificed, many suffered and we walked closer to apocalypse that we care to imagine.
Oddly, now that the Cold War is won, many of those who fought it on our behalf are little better off than they were before. Some are worse off. Do you think we owe anything to our proxies?
Even so, the conditions that existed there represented an "encampment/camp follower culture" that's existed since history's been recorded. I have a real hard time including this in a Reagan indictment.
Wasn't intended as part of the indictment, just as an aside on why the bases were eventually lost. It just strikes me as odd that we were willing to turn a democratic country over to fascism to protect our tenure in the bases, but we weren't willing to rein in our boys. I won't say if that was right or wrong, but I will point out the price we paid for it. |
