By Rickey Singh LAST week as Grenadians marked the 21st anniversary of the United States military invasion of that Eastern Caribbean country, a striking parallel was being made in the politics of deception hatched for George Bush's war on Iraq and what unravelled under Ronald Reagan's administration when the Spice Isle was invaded. Grenadians, still struggling to overcome the nightmare ravages of Hurricane Ivan, were last Monday engaged in various "thanksgiving" activities to mark the invasion that was presented by the Reagan presidency as a mission to restore "democracy" and to defeat an international "communist conspiracy". Credible evidence would easily establish similarities in the outright lies and half-truths of President Reagan's justification for the US invasion of Grenada with fellow Republican president, George W Bush's war on Iraq 20 years later. Back in Grenada of 1983, when a revolutionary experiment in governance devoured itself in an orgy of political executions and creation of a so-called Revolutionary Military Council, there quickly followed a military invasion that Washington was simply anxious to undertake. But the official reason advanced was as false as that of Bush's claim for unleashing his war on Iraq in March 2003. That reason? Saddam Hussein's regime, the world was told, possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed "an imminent threat" to the USA. Time, however, quickly caught up with the deception, leaving Bush to defend - with utter contempt for evidence to the contrary - the falsehood for "regime change" in Baghdad. In the case of the US military invasion of Grenada, as credible evidence would show, President Reagan had spoken of "a large Cuban military force" on the island, where a "complete base with weapons and communications equipment" had been discovered, as well as "arms warehouses", including one that "contained weapons and ammunition stacked to the ceiling, enough to supply thousands of terrorists..." Surprise, surprise. As independent regional and international media were soon to discover, NO such warehouses with weapons stacked to the ceiling were to be found in ANY part of that small island state. But there subsequently followed the unravelling of a US-hatched invasion conspiracy in collaboration with key Caribbean anchormen in the capitals of Barbados and Jamaica. The memory of the slain Maurice Bishop, prime minister and leader of the then People's Revolutionary Government, was to be invoked to help justify the invasion strategy, for which the Treaty of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) was also conveniently distorted, and subsequently exposed. However, to this day, while the whereabouts of Bishop's remains continue to be a mystery, successive governments in St George's have been showing a sad lack of political decency and courage to have the stockpiles of documents and materials seized and flown off to the US by its military during the invasion, returned to the people of Grenada, to whom they really belong. Grenada's day of national shame - the political executions of October 19, 1983 - has been largely left to be commemorated by the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement. And those who had then shed crocodile tears at the collapse of the PRG and political executions, have settled down to live with the indecent spectacle of a monument to the dead American soldiers during the invasion, but nothing of the sort for Grenadians, many of them young men, who were killed by the invaders, along with Cuban construction workers and others. It is understandable why there are Grenadians who still view Reagan's coded "Urgent Fury" invasion as "freedom" from a communist conspiracy involving, as Reagan and his Caribbean allies had claimed, the then Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua. History, however, must not be distorted to fit an invasion plan that had much to do with the agenda of a superpower and its then faithful conservative allies of a US-funded Caribbean Democratic Union (CDU). George Chambers, then prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados' father of independence, Errol Barrow, who had separately exposed the conspiracy of that US-led invasion, are no longer with us. Fortunately, a lot of what they had to say are part of the records that mock the false claims for Reagan's "Urgent Fury" invasion of Grenada, just as is currently happening with mounting evidence, from within the USA itself, on the falsehood advanced for Bush's war on Iraq. For Reagan's secretary of state, George Shultz, who turned up in Grenada shortly after the invasion, what gladdened his eyes was a little Caribbean island he saw as "a lovely piece of real estate". Reagan himself was to arrive later to give his blessing to a completed international airport at Point Saline which, under Bishop's PRG, represented Grenada's single most outstanding post-independence development project, established at great cost to Cuba. An overwhelmed Prime Minister Herbert Blaize was to hail Reagan as a "national hero"; a monument went up to America's war dead on Grenadian soil; and October 25 has evolved as a permanent national holiday to mark the US invasion of a country whose Government now speaks glowingly of "firm friendship" with Cuba. In all of this, there is still no attempt to properly commemorate the memory of Maurice Bishop and have him placed among the genuine national heroes of Grenada. For the Grenada invasion, the media, including for the first time, mainstream US media, were shut out by the Pentagon. Later, groups of journalists were flown, courtesy of the US military, on conducted tours for public relations-oriented coverage of invaded Grenada. In the case of the war on Iraq, the Pentagon had journalists "embedded" with the invading military force. Another relevant comparison is that in October 1983, the Reagan Administration used its decisive veto in the UN Security Council to block a condemnatory resolution on the invasion of Grenada. For his war on Iraq, President Bush was to completely sideline the UN Security Council and now stubbornly defends his doctrine of "pre-emptive war" against a sovereign state deemed necessary in America's "war on terrorism". Have we had enough of Washington's politics of deception to satisfy America's own national interest? Time will tell whether the White House tenant remains George W Bush, as the polls suggest, or whether the challenger John Kerry will occupy the White House for the next four years. SOURCE: JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM