From a writer in Washington, D.C. who must remain anonymous:
I visited El Salvador in August 1988, just as the war against the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) communist guerrillas was reaching its climatic stage. At a hospital in the capital were dozens of children in traction, with parts of their legs and arms destroyed due to land mines. Many worked in the coffee plantations in the country; there, the FMLN would “seed” the fields with mines; men, women and children would set them off. Every year, hundreds of Salvadoran citizens ended up in hospitals such as this one.
How is this connected to today? It is not just that terrorists today are using a variation of land mines against our soldiers and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan–they are called IEDs, or improvised explosive devices. They are designed to maim as much as kill; they require enormous effort to care for the survivors and the explosives slam down economic activity as much as military patrols.
In the name of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, the FMLN made war on the people of El Salvador for nearly half a century. They murdered with impunity, assassinating elected officials, judges, blowing up bridges, buses and the electrical grid of the country. I brought back with me from this beautiful but scared country a black and white pictorial of the carnage caused by the FMLN. Senator Malcolm Wallop asked the Senate leadership to display the admittedly graphic history of the violence of the FMLN; his request was denied.
For too many Americans, including the missionaries and pro-FMLN strap-hangers in America’s universities, the fight in El Salvador was really one of agrarian reformers on one side–the FMLN–and the pro-colonialists and imperialists on the other–the US Government and the Arena party then governing the country.
Like terrorism today, the FMLN were blood thirty murderers, bought and paid for by the Castro boys in Cuba, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the communist leadership in Moscow. They sought only to spread their vicious totalitarianism to one more country in Latin and Central America.
The left in America–Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, Noam Chomsky, CISPES, (the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) have never had to answer for their embrace of terrorists as communists during the Cold War. In denying any connection between terror groups and their masters in Moscow, they simply gave a license to kill for these groups. The FMLN were one of the most deadly.
This past template is reflected in those Americans who believe we have been too big for our britches, too arrogant, too colonial or imperial. To them, American is no more exceptional than any other country, and in many respects is worse. Thus 9/11 was seen as the culmination of grievances against the United States, of our “chickens coming home to roost.” To Reverend Wright, America was just getting its “just deserts” as its past was catching up with its present.
Related to this is a strong tendency to measure US action according to what Senator John Kerry called “an international test” in the 2004 Presidential election. It is reflected in attempts to substitute “UN” standards for those of the US and “worldly” legal tenets for constitutional principles. Through the ideas of some of America’s leaders, we are little more than a former colonial power, imperial in its reach, which should be brought down to size and be but a “partner” with other nations around the globe. Does this mean we are no longer the “leader of the free world”? If so, to whom do our friends repair when their security is threatened?