assessment of the impact of the Panama invasion on the Bush presidency, because he was always battling criticism that he was a wimp, that he was not fit to be president,
Greg Grandin talking:
He was constantly fighting the image of being a wimp and ineffectual, living in the shadow of Ronald Reagan. He was called Reagan’s lapdog. He had a long history of violence in the Third World, starting back from his days in West Texas with the Zapata Oil Company. He was involved with the CIA, which they helped run logistics in the Bay of Pigs. As head of the CIA, he presided over—the head of CIA in 1976 during the height of Operation Condor, which kind of organized national death squads in Latin America into—and coordinated their activity. The single largest run of bombings and executions carried out by Condor happened while Bush was the head of the CIA. Iran-Contra as vice president. And so, Panama—
Iran-Contra was a many—a hydra-headed scandal that involved selling high-tech weaponry to Iran, diverting the profits to support the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. In Central America. In violation of U.S. law, but also it meant—my gesture to it meant that it supported the worst kind of death squaders and assassins and fascists in Central America throughout the 1980s. And Bush was deeply involved in that as vice president and coming out of his work with the CIA. to the bleeding of Panama is that Bush had a long history of violence in the Third World as a way of establishing himself, which obviously continued with the first Gulf War.
When he’s leaving as president, Bush pardons all the people who were involved with it.
he’s defeated by Clinton in the—Christmas Eve 1992, he pardons six of them. And Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor, says that this completes the cover-up of Iran-Contra. So, in some ways, it’s a precedent for current politics in terms of the limits and limitlessness of presidential power to sweep scandals that they’re involved in under the rug.
– President Bush defended his decision to issue the pardons. He issued a statement saying in part, “First, the common denominator for their motivation—whether their actions were right or wrong—was patriotism. Second, they did not profit or seek to profit from their conduct. Third, each has a record of long and distinguished service to this country.”
the scandal went down the memory hole. Iran-Contra was consequential in the sense that it brought together a lot of the different coalitions that made up the Reagan administration—the evangelical right, the neoconservatives, the militarists and anti-communists. And they gave them Central America to run wild with, basically funding the Contras, which were the anti-communist insurgencies seeking to overthrow the Sandinistas.
I might be wrong, but I think they routed that through Manuel Noriega. That’s how it got to the Contras. So it brought together all of the worst elements. But the larger point, it’s all part of overcoming the Vietnam syndrome. It’s all about the executive branch figuring out how it can reassert and project military power, free from all of this democratic oversight. The Congress had prohibited aid to the Contras, and that was the main kind of prompt that forced the Reagan administration to figure out all of—
And the main operation run through Vice President George H.W. Bush’s office. And Oliver North and an interwar party. Oliver North was the point person. He was—you know, so, there was—and so, that’s Bush’s legacy. But it’s a continuation, because if you look at his work in the 1960s with Zapata Oil Company, it’s all the same dense—and the point isn’t to establish conspiracy theory; it’s to show the sociological overlap between these different sections.
His father was OSS, which was the CIA precursor, during World War II. Prescott Bush, before he was senator. he went to Yale, Skull and Bones. Every major player in the Bay of Pigs operation came out of Skull and Bones. I mean, there was no daylight.
The secret society at Yale. The CIA was like Skull and Bones writ large, with a lot—with, you know, millions of dollars’ budget. And so, again, it’s not conspiracy. Because conspiracy theorists are obsessed with the Bush family, and they might and might not have done this or that. But the point is that there was a close relationship between the kind of WASP, pure-blood, East Coast establishment that the Bush family represented and the intelligence community. And Bush represented, in some ways, its radicalization in the—after the Cuban revolution, in Texas, and then Iran-Contra. So, there’s a through line through Bush’s life, which is being completely ignored in all of the obituaries and remembrances of Bush. And that through line is the easy resort to violence in the Third World.
his grandparents. Comes from the bluest blood—Samuel Bush, Prescott Bush, his uncles. He comes from a family that occupied the highest echelons of Episcopalian capitalism, and in its most expansive period, when finance, industry and energy extraction and militarism were interlocking and fusing together. And Bush was born into that in 1924 in Connecticut. He was sheltered during the Great Depression. He went to Greenwich Day School. He went to Phillips Academy and Yale. And then, what’s interesting, sociologically interesting, about Bush is his move to West Texas. So, that move represents the broader shift of American capitalism from the East Coast to this new center of gravity, more ideological, hostile, which becomes the basis of the new right, which becomes the basis of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and even a lot of the forces that back Trump. So…
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Greg Grandin
prize-winning author and professor of Latin American history at New York University.
— source democracynow.org | Dec 04, 2018