Noam Chomsky, in Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, effectively examines the pervasive and destructive role of the United States, especially in El Salvador and Nicaragua, but he wants to do more than that. Specifically, Chomsky seeks to enlighten the public and progressive leaders so that they will change that policy, so that the nations of Central America will be able to become more sovereign, free and democratic, and so that the United States will begin in nations abroad to live up to the democratic ideals and practices about which it so proudly boasts at home. The book has its shortcomings, as we shall see, but its lessons are applicable to not only Central America but to the world, despite those shortcomings.
Chomsky makes his arguments with passion and with much documentation. He thoroughly convinces this reader of the fact that U.S. policy has indeed been thoroughly anti-democratic in Central America, and has been based on the attitude that the U.S. had the right to do whatever it needed to do there in pursuit of its own national interests. The U.S. has pursued such an imperialist policy without regard for the desires of the people in those countries. In addition, the U.S. has supported any leadership in those nations as long as it regarded communism as an enemy, regardless of that leadership's own attitude toward democracy and human rights. In short, Chomsky paints a portrait of a U.S. policy in Central America which is utterly undemocratic and inhumane.
The major problem with Chomsky's book is that it relies for its explanation of such a policy on the dynamics of the Cold War, specifically the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. That is, from Chomsky's point of view, the United States felt justified in pursuing such a ruthless policy because it felt it had to do so in order to win the struggle with the Soviet Communists. The Third World, of which Cen...