//LucasHutmacherDotCom

The purpose of its policy in Central America, said the U.S. government, was to protect the country from the Soviet threat: a Soviet base in Nicaragua and a possible Soviet base in El Salvador.  This was not quite believable.  Was the Soviet Union prepared to launch an invasion of the United States from Central America?  Was a nation that could not win a war on its borders with Afghanistan going to send an army across the Atlantic Ocean to Nicaragua?  And what then?  Would that army then march up through Honduras and into Guatemala, then through all of Mexico, into Texas, and then…?

It was absurd as the domino theory of the Vietnam War, in which the falling dominos of Southeast Asia would have had to swim the Pacific to get to San Francisco.  Did the Soviet Union, with intercontinental ballistic missiles, with submarines off the coast of Long Island, need Central America as a base for attacking the United States?

Nevertheless, the Kissinger Commission, set up by President Reagan to advise him on Central American policy, warned in its report that our “southern flank” was in danger – a biological reference designed to make all of us nervous.

- Howard Zinn – Declarations of Independence

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