Grenada in 1983 Was Small, and It Mattered More Than the Critics Admit

One hundred and eight nations at the United Nations voted to deplore the American operation in Grenada. Nine voted no. And the people of Grenada, the ones who actually lived there, have since set aside October 25 as a national holiday of thanks. I would like you to hold those two facts in your head at the same time, because the distance between them is the whole story.

Folks, the invasion of an island with a population smaller than a decent-sized American county has been told, for four decades now, as a farce: a bungled war against a few hundred Cubans and a runway, launched to distract from a tragedy two days earlier in Beirut. Some of that is true. The operation was messy. The coverage was louder than the combat. But the farce version leaves out the part where a Marxist junta had just murdered its own prime minister, where American citizens were sitting in a country run by gunmen, and where the neighbors begged for help. Let's tell it straight.

A revolution eats its leader

Start with the island. Grenada, a small Caribbean nation of spice farms and beaches, became independent from Britain in 1974. In March 1979 a group calling itself the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, seized power in a coup while the prime minister was abroad. Bishop suspended the constitution, announced a People's Revolutionary Government, and did not hold the elections that had been promised. He built close ties with Fidel Castro's Cuba and with the Soviet bloc.

The revolution had its own internal politics, and in the autumn of 1983 they turned deadly. A hard-line faction led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, backed by the army commander General Hudson Austin, pushed Bishop out of power. In mid-October Bishop was placed under house arrest. On October 19 a crowd freed him, and he led it to the army headquarters at Fort Rupert. Soldiers opened fire, and Bishop and several of his ministers and supporters were taken and executed. A Revolutionary Military Council under Austin took over and announced a curfew, threatening to shoot anyone found outside.

Hold on to that. This was not a foreign invasion of a stable, popular government. The government had already devoured itself. The men now holding the island had just shot the leader of their own revolution and ordered the population indoors.

The neighbors ask

Now the part that gets left out of most retellings. The island's neighbors in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, a group of small island governments, met and decided that the situation on Grenada threatened them all. They did not have an army worth the name between them. They asked for help. Prime Minister Eugenia Charles of Dominica became the face of that request, a formidable woman who stood in front of the cameras and explained, plainly and without apology, why her government wanted the Americans there. There was also an appeal from the governor-general, Sir Paul Scoon, the Queen's representative on the island, who was a prisoner in his own house; the timing and form of his request were later disputed, and I will say so, because honest argument means conceding the points that are contested.

The American government also had a second worry, and it was not made up. Several hundred American medical students were studying at St. George's University on the island. After Bishop's death there was a curfew, the airport was closed, and the students' parents were calling Washington. The memory of Tehran was four years old. Americans had watched fifty-two of their citizens held hostage for 444 days after the embassy was seized in November 1979, and no administration, Republican or Democratic, was going to wait and see whether another group of Americans would become a bargaining chip. For the story of what happened when the last president tried to rescue hostages, read Desert One and the 1980 Disaster That Built Special Operations Command. President Reagan was not going to wait to find out.

The runway

Here is where the critics' favorite punch line, "all that for an airstrip," falls apart.

The Point Salines airport was an international runway under construction on the island's southwestern tip. The Grenadian government said it was for tourism, and Britain and other countries were helping to pay for parts of it. It was also being built with Cuban labor, hundreds of Cuban workers, who were issued small arms and who, as it turned out, fought when the Americans came ashore. A runway long enough for large jets, on an island that sits astride the eastern Caribbean, built by a government allied with Havana and Moscow, with Cuban workers who could be turned into a fighting force, was something the American government was entitled to look at with suspicion.

I would make the point carefully, though, because it can be overstated. Not every airstrip in the Caribbean is a Soviet airbase. What the Grenada operation turned up, once American forces were on the ground, was a good deal more than tourism: warehouses of weapons, much of it Soviet and Cuban in origin, and documents from the Grenadian government that pointed to a military relationship with the Soviet bloc well beyond anything a country of a hundred thousand people needed. A reasonable observer can argue about how much weight to put on it. What an observer cannot do is pretend the evidence was not there.

Two days after Beirut

On Sunday, October 23, 1983, a truck bomb hit the Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport. It killed 241 American service members, most of them Marines. The attack is explored in Beirut 1983 Was the First Lesson in How Iran Fights Through Proxies, and it was an act of war carried out by forces that would be identified with Iran's sponsorship.

Two days later, October 25, American troops landed on Grenada. And here the critics do their favorite trick: they say the invasion was a distraction. The timing makes a good conspiracy, and it does not survive the calendar. The Caribbean governments' request reached Washington on October 21 and 22, before the bombing, and the students' safety was already under discussion, though the President's formal directive was signed on October 23, after it. Reagan himself said so in his address to the nation on October 27, when he spoke about both events in the same speech and did not pretend they were unconnected in the larger picture of Soviet and Cuban ambition.

But there is a deeper way in which the two events do belong together, and it is worth saying. In one case America had lost 241 of its own to an enemy it could not easily strike back at. In the other it was able to act decisively against an enemy that was within reach. The country needed to see that its armed forces could win, and that when American citizens were in danger and a legitimate request for help came from neighboring governments, Washington would respond. That is not a conspiracy. That is what a government is supposed to do.

What actually happened on the island

On October 25 American forces, including Army Rangers, the 82nd Airborne Division, Marines, Navy SEALs and Air Force units, went in, with some Caribbean forces taking part. The Rangers parachuted onto the Point Salines runway, which was blocked with obstacles and defended by Cuban and Grenadian troops. The Marines landed on the northern end of the island. The students at the True Blue campus were reached on the first day, and the second campus the next day. Fighting continued for several days. By early November the island was secured. American losses were nineteen killed and well over a hundred wounded, many of the deaths coming in helicopter crashes and accidents. Cuban dead numbered around two dozen.

Now the critics have a point, and I want to give it to them. The operation was ragged. Intelligence on the island was thin; commanders were reportedly using tourist maps. The services had trouble talking to each other: Army and Navy and Marine units had incompatible radios and unclear command lines, and the planning was split in ways that made coordination hard. SEAL teams suffered losses in the opening hours. Helicopters were shot down. There were friendly-fire problems and a bombing that hit a mental hospital and killed civilians. And the operation took longer than it should have against an enemy that was not large.

Those failures were not the end of the story, and a thoughtful conservative should not hide them. They are the reason Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986, a reform that strengthened joint command and gave the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the authority a unified military needed. Grenada, together with the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue and the Beirut command failures, was one of the experiences that persuaded Congress to fix how the services work together. The Gulf War, only seven years later, ran on that reform. If you like a military that can win, thank the embarrassment.

The press fight

The press has never forgiven what happened next. For the first two days of the operation, reporters were kept off the island. Commanders did not want journalists in the way or in danger, and the administration did not want live reporting while the fighting continued. Reporters who tried to reach the island on their own were turned back, and the news organizations protested bitterly.

The press had a real grievance. Americans were fighting and the American people were told about it by government spokesmen alone. After the operation, the Pentagon set up a commission under retired Major General Winant Sidle, which recommended that a pool of reporters be ready to deploy with the first wave of future operations. That is the origin of the media pool system the military used afterward.

Here is an observation, and I'll make it with a smile. The same journalists who were outraged about being kept away from combat for forty-eight hours had spent the previous days covering the Beirut bombing, and the coverage of Grenada took for granted from its first hour that the whole thing was foolish. The framing of the story as a "mini-invasion" of a "tiny island" implied that big countries have no right to act against small ones that murder their leaders. By that standard, there is no right to rescue anybody from anyone with a smaller flag. It is a strange sort of ethics that says the strength of the neighbors' request counts for nothing and the size of the island counts for everything.

Was it legal?

Let me make the argument properly, in the numbered form, because the legal question is where critics are strongest and deserve a real answer.

One. The United Nations General Assembly voted in early November, 108 to 9, to "deplore" the intervention as a violation of international law. The United States vetoed a similar draft in the Security Council. The numbers sound damning until you look at who was voting. Many of the governments in the majority were authoritarian regimes or states that were at best indifferent to the fate of a Caribbean island, and the Assembly's resolutions have no binding force.

Two. The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States' treaty provided a basis for collective action among its members in a case of external threat. The request for help from those governments gave the intervention a regional footing, not a unilateral one. The legal arguments about whether that footing was strong enough are real, and scholars have argued about them for forty years.

Three. The domestic law question was the War Powers Resolution of 1973. President Reagan sent Congress a report on October 25, though some members argued it did not satisfy the Resolution. In practice the main fighting was over before any court or congressional vote could constrain it, which is the problem the Framers worried about and which this site returns to often: see Commander in Chief Means Less Than Presidents Claim and More Than Critics Say. A short, successful action eliminates the dispute about the war power, but it does not answer it.

Four. The students. Protecting nationals abroad has long been recognized as a legitimate reason for an intervention, and the reasoning is not unique to America.

I come down this way: the intervention was lawful enough, and prudent, and the objection that matters is the constitutional one about how a president should seek congressional support for even a small operation. Reagan did not make that case as well as he could have.

What the island did next

The best answer to the claim that Grenada was an American crime is the island's own conduct. The junta's leaders were arrested and tried by Grenadian courts, and Coard and others were convicted of the murders of Bishop and his colleagues. The island held elections in December 1984, with a government that was not a Marxist junta, and it has held elections since. Grenadians keep a national Thanksgiving Day on October 25, the anniversary of the landing. Not many invaded countries mark the invasion with a holiday.

Compare that with what a Cuban-backed junta might have done with the island if left alone. We have no way to run that experiment, but the history of other Marxist regimes in the Caribbean and elsewhere gives little reason to expect that a government that had just shot its own leader would have turned toward liberty by itself.

Why it signaled more than it cost

What Grenada told the world in October 1983 was that the Soviet bloc could not assume that a new client state, once installed, would be left alone. The Brezhnev doctrine said that once a country joined the socialist camp it stayed there. Grenada was a rare case of a Marxist government removed by force and replaced through elections. It was small, and that is the point. A country that cannot manage a small operation with success cannot persuade anyone it will manage a large one, and a country that does manage it, however clumsily, sends a message at the price of nineteen lives and not nineteen thousand.

The wider lesson is about deterrence, the subject of Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price. Deterrence is a matter of what your adversaries believe you will do, and beliefs are shaped by the small actions as well as the large. Grenada added to the impression, along with the Reagan defense buildup and the deployment of missiles in Europe, that the early 1980s were not a good time to test American resolve. And for a view of how the same decade ended, see Reagan at Westminster in 1982 Predicted the Soviet Collapse Out Loud.

There is also a lesson for how we remember wars. Whole books could be written about the planning errors of Grenada, and they would be useful. But a nation that remembers only its errors learns to fear every use of force, and a nation that remembers only its triumphs learns nothing. The conservative position, as always, is to look at the record: what worked, what did not, and why.

The case in brief

1. The Grenada coup of October 1983, ending in the execution of Maurice Bishop, left a military junta in charge of an island with several hundred Americans on it and a Cuban-built runway nearby.
2. The Eastern Caribbean states asked for help, and the protection of American citizens was a long-recognized ground for action.
3. Operation Urgent Fury was ragged, with communication failures, thin intelligence and avoidable losses, and those failures helped produce the Goldwater-Nichols reforms of 1986.
4. The United Nations vote against it of 108 to 9 measured politics, not the facts, and Grenada's own conduct since, including its annual day of thanks, answers the claim of illegitimacy.
5. The real objection is constitutional: even a small and successful operation should come with a clear request to Congress.

What you can do: Look up the War Powers Resolution of 1973 on Congress.gov and read its reporting requirements, then ask your representative at the my-representatives page whether Congress should vote before, not after, a president sends forces abroad.