Salvadoran Civil War - Justifications For US Involvement

Justifications For US Involvement

Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, J. Michael Kelly asserted that the most difficult psychological operations would not be in Central America. "I think the most critical special operations mission we have today is to persuade the American public that the Communists are out to get us," he declared at the 1983 National Defense University conference. "The task is mind-boggling. If we win the war of ideas, we will win everything else."

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, in his 1987 report to Congress, renewed the call for low intensity warfare, warning of those in the Third World "who seek to undermine our security by persistently nibbling away at our interests through these shadow wars carried out by guerrillas, assassins, terrorists, and subversives in the hope that they have found a weak point in our defenses."

General Maxwell Taylor, the fifth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained that the purpose of U.S. low intensity warfare was to sustain United States control over much of the world's resources against the efforts of the "have-nots" who are attempting to overturn the established political and economic order.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who headed the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America said that U.S. covert action was needed in Central America to maintain the credibility of the United States in other parts of the world with growing civil unrest. "A lot will depend on how Central America comes out," he said in an interview in Public Opinion magazine. "If we cannot manage Central America it will be impossible to convince threatened nations in the Persian Gulf and in other places that we know how to manage the global equilibrium," Kissinger said. "We will face a series of upheavals that will absorb so much of our energies that we will be deflected from our previous policies. I am sympathetic to covert operations if we can still conduct them the way their name implies. But if covert operations have to be justified in a public debate, they stop being covert and we will wind up losing public support."

Similarly, in Congressional testimony in 1985, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig said, "If we fail to deal with these problems today in El Salvador, we may find them developing in areas which are less ambiguous and far more dangerous." "The escalating setbacks to our interests abroad," Haig proclaimed when the Reagan administration took office in 1981; "and the so-called wars of national liberation, are putting in jeopardy our ability to influence world events."

In April 1983, President Reagan said that if the Salvadoran government was overthrown by an internal revolt, other governments in Central America would fall too. "That night, the sound of collapsing dominos was heard throughout the networks," said New York Times media critic, John Corry. U.S. foreign policy analysts at the RAND Corporation noted the need for covert action in Central America as a means of ensuring continued U.S. access to vital raw materials, primarily oil and natural gas in Venezuela and Mexico. Michael Novak, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights warned, "Liberation Theology" could prevail if the U.S. did not intervene.

"There was an impression that the revolutionary left was on a roll in Central America," Boston Globe Editor Randolph Ryan observes. "The administration correctly saw that infectious spirit as a "virus" that had to be stopped."

We understand and sympathize with the aspirations of the developing countries. However, we also have an enormous stake in the continuing smooth functioning of the international economic system. We are the world's largest exporter and importer of both raw materials and manufactured goods, the largest overseas investor, and the largest international debtor as well as the largest creditor. Major changes in the system can thus have important implications for our own welfare.

— --Richard Cooper, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, 1980

In the Central American-Caribbean region, our credibility worldwide is engaged. The triumph of hostile forces...would be read as a sign of U.S. impotence. This country has large stakes in the present conflict in Central America. They include preventing:

• The erosion of our power to influence events worldwide that would flow from the perception that we were unable to influence vital events close to home.

— --Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, 1984

Neil Livingstone wrote that "Those in the Congress who cry the loudest for cutting aid to nations like El Salvador are the real patrons of death squads. By denying the Salvadoran government the resources and assistance it needs to fight a "clean war" on the battlefield, Congressional opponents are, for all intents and purposes, mandating that those frustrated by the government's inability to win a decisive victory by means of conventional military power will increasingly resort to a "dirty war" in the cities and countryside". The US increased aid as atrocities declined. The UN Truth Commission received direct complaints of almost 2,600 victims of serious violence occurring in 1980. It received direct complaints of just over 140 victims of serious violence occurring in 1985.