The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780525522225
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-06T15:00:00+00:00

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The tiny island of Grenada, in the eastern Caribbean, was no longer a British colony but an independent member of the Commonwealth. In 1979, a Marxist agitator named Maurice Bishop took power in a revolution. The Americans suspected him of serving the interests of Cuba and the Soviet Union. In 1983, a military faction in Bishop’s party deposed the leader, shot him, and then cut his throat. Several Caribbean nations asked the US to intervene. Without bothering to inform the British, Reagan ordered a military invasion, named Operation Urgent Fury. Securing this tiny tropical outpost was hailed by the US administration as a great victory. One of Reagan’s men exulted. “Grenada showed that it could be done. It proved that boldness and determination could defeat Communists.”25

One reason the US much needed a boost to its morale was a debacle in Beirut, where the US had stationed troops to bolster the Lebanese government under a Christian president during the brutal civil war. A week after Bishop was overthrown in Grenada, Islamist suicide bombers murdered 241 US servicemen, a humiliating blow to the Reagan administration. Then there was the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, the perception among American hawks—commonly known as “neoconservatives,” who would do so much damage later on—that the US had gone soft after “losing” Vietnam and years of détente. It was time for the US to show “resolve.” Grenada was an opportunity to do so.

But Operation Urgent Fury showed how illusory the Special Relationship, which Thatcher, for some reason, had renamed the “extraordinary relationship,” often proved to be. Since the British had not been told about the invasion in advance, the foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, made a fool of himself by assuring Parliament that such an action was unlikely to take place. The prime minister was accused of letting the president treat her like a doormat or, in the words of Denis Healey, the shadow foreign secretary, “an obedient poodle.”26 She later expressed her dismay: “At best, the British Government had been made to look impotent; at worst we looked deceitful.”27

In fact, Thatcher had not been in favor of any military action at all. This struck the Americans as ungrateful, even perverse, after all the help she had been given over the Falklands. But Thatcher argued, with some reason, that the Falklands conflict was a defensive war against an invasion, whereas Grenada was invaded to change a regime, and not a very important one at that. What made it all more awkward was that the queen was Grenada’s head of state. Thatcher didn’t really believe that Grenada was about to become another Cuba, or that Bishop’s killers were any worse than Bishop had been. But in the end Thatcher was philosophical about the affair. She told her adviser George Urban that the US had done Britain a disservice in Grenada, but she “had learnt to think that this is how very large powers behave. Morality does not really come into the picture. The more the pity.”28

(In fact, the regime change in Grenada turned out to be a success.

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