A dose of political medicine: Grenada

At the most southern tip of an arc of small volcanic islands in the Caribbean lies a tiny nation. It may have remained anonymous among the many island paradises speckling the globe between Florida and Venezuela but for a few weeks of violence in the 1980s. This is Grenada--its name is the only relic of Spanish colonisation.

The years since independence from British influence have left Grenada different from any other nation in the eastern Caribbean. Radical left wing idealism and an unlikely alliance with Cuba created a nation doing better than others with similar demographic, geographic, and economic problems--until this radicalism fell prey to its own extremists.

A coup, provoked by the prime minister forging closer ties with the United States, plunged the nation into brief but bloody chaos. The presence of medical students on the island was used to justify familiar US foreign policy: it wielded its might against a nation whose politics contradicted American ideals. The United States …