For U.S. citizens, the attacks of Sept. 11 have come to represent the beginning of a new era.
We no longer feel secure in our own borders. We face an unpredictable, despicably evil, global threat. We must fight for our freedom all over the world in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Fear of terrorism has become the focal point of our collective consciousness, and the War on Terror has become the primary focus of our government's foreign policy.
Although this may feel new to us, sadly, it is not. It is a return to the mentality and the foreign policy of the Cold War era. During the Cold War, U.S. citizens were shackled by fear of a global threat driven by pure evil and a hatred of U.S. freedom. Wars were fought and funded all over the world in places such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Nicaragua. Once again, it was Us v. Them. There was no middle ground.
The Cold War and the War on Terror certainly possess differences. Today's enemy is not a nation-state but rather a network of individuals, bank accounts and sympathetic populations. Today's warfare is asymmetrical, and mutually-assured destruction cannot serve as a deterrent to conflict - as it did during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the Cold War and the War on Terror are hauntingly similar. In both cases, the government mobilized the nation into a mentality of constant war through dire warnings of imminent deadly attacks from an illogical enemy bent on the destruction of everything our country holds dear. In the contemporary context, the worst result of this rhetoric has been our government's curtailment of some of our basic civil rights through the Patriot Act. But in both the Cold War and the War on Terror
the concept of total global warfare resulted in support for repressive, undemocratic regimes - such as in El Salvador during the '80s and in Pakistan today - and in the wanton use of violence to further the geopolitical goals of these wars.
One of the best examples of U.S. support for repression and terrorist violence in the name of fighting communism came in the impoverished, seemingly insignificant country of Nicaragua. In 1979, the U.S.-backed Somoza regime - arguably one of the most brutal, corrupt and oppressive regimes in the history of the world - was overthrown by a popular national uprising led by the Sandinista Front for National Liberation.
Once in power, the Sandinistas embarked on a revolutionary agenda that addressed the grave social and economic injustices which had plagued the majority of Nicaraguans for centuries. They carried out basic land reforms, constructed health clinics and, by 1980, had completed a literacy campaign that saw the illiteracy rate drop from 51 to 12 percent. They professed political pluralism - confirmed by free and fair elections in 1984 and 1990, non-alignment in the Cold War and cultivated diplomatic relations with as many countries as possible, including the Soviet bloc.
But by 1981, the Reagan administration saw Sandinista Nicaragua as a dangerous precedent in Latin America and unfairly labeled them as communistic. Reagan began funneling arms and money to the Contras - a group of counter-revolutionaries who were attempting to subvert the Sandinista government through blatantly terrorist activities. They assassinated health workers, community leaders and religious people, sabotaged crucial infrastructure and raided small villages.
While in rural, northern Nicaragua, I stayed with a woman named Amada. Her son was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Contras, and two of her daughters were kidnapped and raped by them. These human rights abuses were common practices of the Contras and led Congress to decide in 1986 to stop funding them. But the Reagan administration continued supporting the Contras illegally through the Iran-Contra Affair.
Like the Contra War, the war in Iraq has been based on flimsy, fear-induced rhetoric. The Bush administration played on U.S. citizens' feelings of vulnerability after the attacks of Sept. 11 to foster support for a war that was largely unrelated to these attacks. This was reminiscent of the way the Reagan administration portrayed the Sandinistas as a Soviet beachhead in our backyard and a threat to U.S. freedom when the Sandinistas were merely trying to provide freedom for their own people.
The enemies and the countries have changed, but the deceptive rhetoric, the climate of fear and the hasty resort to military force has not. Terrorists must be combated, but we cannot allow our government to mire us in a fear-induced mentality of perpetual war.
Only in such a state of mind is it possible for our government to mislead us, start wars and curtail our freedoms. We must realize that when these things happen, we are terrorizing ourselves, and we are not heeding the vital lessons the past can teach us.
- Danny Burridge is a senior political science major. Send him an e-mail at db134102@ohiou.edu. 17
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Danny Burridge
