Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous R

wounded in their bid to fight a major leaguer. The senseless waste of life and the ignominious surrender signaled the total failure of the junta in a way that the dirty war had failed to do and energized the cowed Argentine citizens into finally standing up to the junta.

Strikes and demonstrations ousted Galtieri as president on June 17 when his fellow generals voted him out. This led to the end of the junta and the country’s descent into democ­racy. Elections were held in 1983. Eventually Galtieri was tried for his role in the junta’s crimes and sent to prison in 1986. He died in 2003.

As for the people of the Falklands, their rocky islands fi­nally became a tourist attraction for Britons willing to travel to the ends of the earth for a faint taste of fading glory. In 1983 Falkland Islanders were restored to full British citizen­ship, and there have been no serious discussions between Argentina and Britain over sovereignty of the islands. A large garrison protects the islands from any further outbreak of Argentine macho.

FIFTEEN. THE U.S. INVASION OF GRENADA:1983

In 1980, the American people elected Ronald Reagan presi­dent.

He was elected partly based on his promise of making America proud again after the long nightmare of the Vietnam War and the humiliation of the 444-day hostage drama in Iran. A former actor fondly remembered as playing a straight man to a chimp, Reagan felt empowered to accomplish his mission by attacking the Communists wherever they popped up using whatever means he could muster. He was busy.

Reagan’s dream required a vastly expanded military. He spent billions to add ships, bombers, tanks, and missiles to the U.S. arsenal. Armed with these new toys, the military leaders could hardly wait to try them out for real on a “de­serving” country.

Meanwhile in Grenada, a tiny island at the bottom of the Caribbean near South America, its prime minister Maurice Bishop, under the banner of his “New Jewel Movement,” was running the palm-tree-lined country with a Communist government so small and secretive that very few Grenadan citizens realized it was actually Communist. Interestingly, Bishop grabbed power in a coup against the kooky president Eric Gairy while Gairy was in New York trying to convince the UN to hold a conference on aliens. Bishop’s main pledge project for the worldwide Communist fraternity became shoehorning a large airport into a corner of the hilly little island with the help of Cuban engineers. It could be used for tourist jets or — more ominously — military planes.

To the rabid anti-Communists in Reagan’s administration and the Pentagon, it seemed obvious that the ten- thousand-foot runway was the first step by a brazen cadre of revolu­tionaries intent on turning the small island into a hub of revolution in the Caribbean. Nothing was done, however, until Bernard Coard, the number-two man in the island’s micro-Marxist Party, felt that Bishop was somehow betray­ing the revolution by not letting him be number one. An American-educated economist who in reality was a crypto-Stalinist, Coard strongly agreed with himself that to further the revolution in textbook KGB style, Bishop should be lined up against a wall and machine-gunned.

The rabidly anti-Communist American government, eager to crush the tiny Grenadan threat and win a clear- cut victory with their new, shiny weapons, realized that hundreds of American medical students lived at Grenada’s St. George’s medical school, only a few hundred yards from the dreaded runway’s edge. In the revitalized military, the United States had the diamond-hard might to get these possibly threatened young men and women, along with their hematology text­books, safely home. Once Coard shot Bishop and took over, Reagan’s anti-Commie crusaders fueled up the jets for a quick weekend invasion in the Caribbean.

No one wanted to miss the fun.

THE PLAYERS

Ronald Reagan — U.S. president, ex-movie star, anti-Communist who revived jingoistic military operation code names.

Skinny — Never let an invasion spoil a good golf game.

Props — Invaded one of Margaret Thatcher’s commonwealth countries without her permission.

Pros — Once his aides advised him of a decision he should make, he stood behind it 100 percent.

Cons — Often didn’t remember what his advisors had decided for him the day before.

Oliver “Ollie” North — Marine colonel on National Security Council staff and proto anti- Communist.

Skinny — Absolutely never tempted to skip an invasion to play golf.

Props — Hired leggy paper-shredder Fawn Hall as his right-hand man.

Pros — Pledged to defend the Constitution of the United States.

Cons — Believed the Constitution allowed him to do whatever he wanted.

Bernard Coard — U.S.-educated treasury secretary of Grenada’s micro-Marxist party who promoted himself to island ruler by killing his predecessor, Maurice Bishop.

Skinny — Practiced a revolutionary theory of “lead the revolution by hiding” when the invasion began.

Props — Very organized, kept his folders stacked neatly on his desk.

Pros — Thought Communist revolution and industrialism would provide a better future for Grenada than tourism.

Cons — Had no idea that the United States could actually invade a country.

THE GENERAL SITUATION

In 1983, American soldiers were patrolling Beirut in a futile effort to establish democracy in Lebanon while desperately trying to fend off Syrian control of the Islamic militias. Nu­clear missiles were being delivered to Western Europe to counter the thousands of Russian missiles already in place. The Contras were being funded to battle the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the CIA was funding the mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Cold War was pretty damn hot.

Also that year the secret micro-Marxist party running Grenada was bubbling with dissent. Cuba had indeed sup­plied hundreds of engineers to build a giant runway, but island strongman Maurice Bishop’s main partner in the gov­ernment, Bernard Coard, wasn’t happy.

Coard, the party’s treasury secretary, had studied econom­ics at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and at Sussex University in Britain and had somehow, inexplicably, man­aged to turn himself into an ardent Marxist hard- liner. Per­haps jealous of Bishop’s power, Coard accused Bishop of betraying the revolution, despite the obvious evidence of the giant airstrip being slowly built by the Cuban engineers and the piles of weapons delivered by the Cubans and Russians.

As the money man, Coard knew that the revolution wasn’t going well. The 100,000-person island nation was having trouble paying its bills, perhaps because turning it into a tiny version of such giant, failing states as Cuba and Russia was working all too well. Other than the production of nutmeg and some tourism, the one bright spot for the regime was St. George’s Medical School, which paid the government a lot of rent. But for a government trying to foment Marxist revolu­tion, relying on a couple of hundred B-level American medical students for funding was