reagan-chomsky-clandestine

On the other hand, they couldn’t do the same things. So for example,
Kennedy could invade Cuba and launch the world’s to-date major interna-
tional terrorist operation against them—which went on for years, probably
still is going on. He was able to invade South Vietnam, which he did after
all: Kennedy sent the American Air Force to bomb and napalm South Viet-
nam and defoliate the country, and he sent troops to crush the peasant in-
dependence movement there. And Vietnam’s an area of minor American
concern, it’s way on the other end of the world. The Reagan administration
tried to do similar things much closer to home in Central America, and
couldn’t. As soon as they started moving towards direct intervention in
Central America in the first few months of the administration in 1981, they
had to back off and move to clandestine operations—secret arms sales,
covert funding through client states, training of terrorist forces like the con-
tras in Nicaragua, and so on.

That’s a very striking difference, a dramatic difference. And I think that
difference is one of the achievements of the activism and dissidence of the
last twenty-five years. In fact, the Reagan administration was forced to cre-
ate a major propaganda office, the Office of Public Diplomacy: it’s not the
first one in American history, it’s the second, the first was during the Wilson
administration in 1917. But this one was much larger, much more exten-
sive, it was a major effort at indoctrinating the public. The Kennedy ad-
ministration never had to do that, because they could trust that the
population would be supportive of any form of violence and aggression
they decided to carry out. That’s a big change, and it’s had its effects. There
were no B-52s in Central America in the 1980s. It was bad enough, hun-
dreds of thousands of people were slaughtered—but if we’d sent B-52s and
the 82nd Airborne, it would have been a lot worse. And that’s a reflection
of a serious rise in domestic dissidence and activism in the United States
over the past twenty-five years. The Reagan administration was forced into
clandestine tactics rather than direct aggression of the sort that Kennedy
was able to use in Vietnam, largely in order to pacify the domestic popula-
tion. As soon as Reagan indicated that he might try to turn to direct mili-
tary intervention in Central America, there was a convulsion in the country,
ranging from a massive flow of letters, to demonstrations, to church groups
getting involved; people started coming out of the woodwork all over the
place. And the administration immediately backed off.

—Noam Chomsky. Understanding Power, pp. 2–3