Cheney and the Monroe Doctrine
by Rense Johnson, Chairman, Citizens for Term Limits
WRITTEN DURING THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN OF 2000
We read that Vice Presidential candidate Richard Cheney is being “investigated” by writer Pete Yost in a bylined article presented as straight news by the Associated Press. The subject is Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney and his defense of Lt.Col. Oliver North’s assistance to the anti-communist freedom fighters of Nicaragua in the Iran Contra hearings thirteen years ago. North wasn’t just helping freedom fighters. He was helping defend America by helping to reassert the Monroe Doctrine.
In 1961 John Kennedy lost his nerve at the Bay of Pigs and withdrew promised support from Cuban freedom fighters in their efforts to retake their native land from communist Fidel Castro. This put the coup de grace to the Monroe Doctrine, which had served as a cornerstone of American foreign policy for nearly a century and a half.
Cuba, supported by the communist Soviet Union, then became a breeding ground for exportation of communism to other Latin American Countries. This communist expansion continued without serious impediment from the U. S. until Ronald Reagan became president.
In eight short years the Reagan Administration managed to eliminate communism from the hemisphere everywhere but in Cuba, which when Reagan retired was still under the protective wing of the Soviet Union. The liberating momentum begun by Reagan had not yet culminated in dissolution of the Soviet Union.
One of the arguments put forth by apologists for the anti-term limitation careerists in Washington is that with term limits we would lose what they call institutional memory—that is, recollection and presumably comprehension of what has transpired in government prior to the arrival of what would be the most senior members under term limitation.
Well, we don’t have congressional term limitation yet, and we already have institutional amnesia. Not only do we not hear a peep from these careerists (or anyone else) about the Monroe Doctrine, we are beginning to hear that it is perhaps time to ease off on our embargo of Cuba, because it hasn’t done any good in some forty years.
The crux of the Monroe Doctrine reads as follows:
...with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States...
To those amnesiacs who say the embargo hasn’t done any good in forty years, we say of course it hasn’t done any good since only one president in the last eight, Ronald Reagan, has done anything to take a strong national defense stance and reestablish the Monroe Doctrine, which Kennedy kissed off without a murmur from the compliant press. And that one President was busy using all of his resources, including Oliver North, to stop the spread of Cuba-spawned Communism elsewhere in Latin America.
Perhaps we should investigate Mr. Yost, who likely never heard of the Monroe Doctrine, and who would have us believe that patriotism—and fighting for freedom in this country and abroad, without an American shot being fired—are somehow wrong.
Candidate Cheney should stand up and proudly proclaim that he has worked for freedom and for American security whenever he had the opportunity, and when that included Lt.Col. North, that he, Cheney, defended him too.
And every patriotic American should applaud.
