Who's the leader of this club that's made for you and me?

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2012)

"The de facto role of the United States Armed Forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing." - Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters
"The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will eventually ask, 'why not us?'" - Chomsky
Clint Eastwood stars in and directs "Heartbreak Ridge", a dumb propaganda film about US military actions in Grenada. Made with Pentagon support and constructed in the mould of 1950s war films (particularly "Take the High Ground" and "Sands of Iwo Jima"), most of which saw tough-guy Sergeants (John Wayne, Richard Whitmark) grooming misfits for war, the film stars Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergeant Highway, a no-nonsense warrior who takes a band of delinquents and builds them up into hard-as-nails killers.
All the genre's clichés are here: Highway is the tough daddy disciplinarian whom the group slowly learn to love, his grunts are all rebels and misfits who learn to "heroically" do their duty, and high ranking military men outside of Highway are presented as being inept goof-balls. As is the case with all these films, the very non-conformity of Highway and his boys – their supposed dissidence and "individuality" in the face of state ideology – disguises/facilitates their absolute conformity.
"Ridge" climaxes with Operation Urgent Fury, the 1983 US invasion of Grenada. Before this the film shamelessly parrots the line of Pentagon spin-doctors. Eastwood and his grunts do not invade the tiny island of Grenada, instead they "go to Grenada to rescue US tourists, school kids and students" from "evil soldiers". One must remember that the official pretext for invading Grenada back in the 1980s was "the protection of American lives", specifically 800 students at the US run St George's University of Medicine. In reality none of the students were in danger, none wanted to leave and the invasion was actually designed to oust Maurice Bishop, the people's revolutionary who rallied the islands few thousand inhabitants against Prime Minister Erich Gairy. Within months Bishop had put in place policies which irked Carter and Reagan, who were all at the time busy overthrowing/assassinating similar democratically elected leaders and/or left-wing movements in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
Bishop achieved more in a few months than anyone expected, Grenada reaching a 9 percent cumulative growth rate, unemployment dropping from 50 to 14 percent, agriculture diversified, cooperatives developed, imports dropping from 40 to 25 percent as a result of sustainability measures, literacy rates jumping to 98 percent, a free education and health system being established, the number of schools tripling and various industrial programs set in motion.
At the time, Grenada's turn-around was praised by the World Bank. But Carter would adopt an adversarial attitude and put in place a program to assassinate Bishop and isolate the tiny Caribbean island. And so the UN Mission in Grenada is bugged, Bishop's party is infiltrated by the CIA, Western media begins to spread propaganda with the aim of discouraging tourists, the CIA begins a destabilisation program and rumours are spread about Soviet submarine, missile and air bases being present on the island. As far as the public is concerned, the tiny island of Grenada is a rouge, terrorist state. When all these rumours are debunked by journalists leading up to the invasion, the major news chains refuse to air retractions. Meanwhile the CIA begins planting bombs at local rallies, inadvertently kills several civilians and sets about trying to weaken the island's economy. This goes on for roughly 4 years.
Prior to the invasion, The CIA begins to sew discord in Bishop's Party. Bernard Coard, Bishop's childhood friend and co-revolutionary, begins to break away from Bishop. Coard stages a coup and arrests Bishop, but Bishop is set free by a crowd of some 10,000 Grenadians, all staunch supporters. In response Coard's men apparently massacred Bishop and his closest followers. To this date no one knows where the orders came from and who committed the murders. Coard blames the CIA, the CIA blames Coard. Coard is a free man today. Gairy was given diplomatic immunity in the US. Coard's actions were used as a pretext to invade the island; these plans were drawn up years earlier.
To facilitate the invasion the US constructs an unbelievable hoax in which it is stated that the Organizaton of Eastern Caribbean States had asked the US to invade the backwater island in order to "protect other Caribbean islands from Grenadian aggression". The invasion takes place, its date of execution designed to distract the public from American casualties and failed US policy in Lebanon (250 US troops dead days earlier). Declassified documents would reveal that US bombing runs systematically targeted Grenadian factories; one of the first targets was a canning plant which helped Grenadians can their own food (rather than relying on foreign companies).
The Pentagon claims that "weapons of mass destruction were found", which are years later revealed to be rifles manufactured in the 1870s and two Bren guns circa 1950. The US puts in place an interim government, rigged courts and tribunals are set up to assign blame, lawyers and judges are paid hush money, neoliberal polices are put in place to favour foreign investment, state enterprises are given over to foreign private interests and modern consumer capitalism is officially brought to Grenada. In 1991 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights find that throughout this pantomime the US Government under Carter and Reagan had violated a slew of laws and articles. The report was released when US F16s were bombing Baghdad.
4/10 – Worth one viewing for the always-cool Clint Eastwood. See instead "Full Metal Jacket" and Cox's "Walker".