Absurdity on Nicaragua

President Reagan and some others in his Administration hope that the war in Nicaragua conducted by the rebels, the contras, can overthrow the ruling Sandinistas or at least persuade them to abandon their Marxist-Leninist principles. To that end the President is using extravagant rhetoric to persuade Congress to free $14 million earmarked for continued support of the contras.

He calls them freedom fighters, and says that they are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers; “support for them is morally right and intimately linked to our own security”; opposition in Congress to his policy is merely the result of “the very sophisticated lobbying campaign” of the Sandinistas and their Russian and Cuban backers.

There are some fairly high-ranking officials in the Reagan Administration who share Reagan’s views, who may indeed even be responsible for some of them.

But U.S. officials on the spot in Central America, and others in Washington, think that the notion of overthrowing the Sandinistas with the contras is absurd.

They believe, and the evidence supports them, that it would take a sizable invasion of U.S. forces, and a good long time, and an appalling number of casualties to oust the Sandinistas.

Yet the President and other members of the Administration insist that they have no intention of invading Nicaragua. There is no reason to disbelieve them; Congress and public opinion would not support an invasion.

Then why are the President and other high officials saying what they are saying?

Either they are letting hope overshadow judgment or they are not, in the end, serious. Neither wishful thinking nor insouciance is a sound king post on which to build a foreign policy.

If the “protection of peace, freedom and our way of life” depends on the support of the contras, as Reagan said, then a billion dollars would not be too much to toss to the pickup rebel bands. If the security of the United States and its stature in the world depend on the overthrow of the Sandinistas, then Congress can surely be counted on to approve the invasion forthwith.

Congress, however, has a less excited view of the mortal peril posed to the United States by a small, poor country of 3 million people; it is balking at releasing that $14 million. What then? The President told the Washington Post this week that he doesn’t know. “That’s something I’d have to face,” he said, as if foreign policy were to be played as an improvised charade. The White House is now casting about for alternatives.

The Administration’s wild talk and crude actions could scarcely be better calculated to promote the results that it professes to abhor. The contras provide to the Sandinistas the enemy that they can well use to consolidate their revolution. The stature of the United States is diminished by its illegal action against a sovereign nation. And if the United States keeps saying that its security depends on somehow eliminating the Marxist influence from the Sandinistas, then the United States is going to look uncommonly foolish when it doesn’t happen.

The pity is that all this is avoidable. The Sandinistas say that they are willing to stop supporting the rebels in El Salvador and to negotiate reductions on foreign advisers and arms throughout the region. U.S. officials believe that they are serious, but Washington has added a new condition: a substantial change of government within Nicaragua. That, the Nicaraguans say, is not negotiable. Hence the diplomatic stalemate; hence the Administration’s increasingly clamorous support for the contras.

The Administration is most unlikely to get, at a cost that it or the American people are willing to pay, substantially more than the Nicaraguans have already under pressure conceded.

Some members of the divided Administration claim to take seriously the Contadora process--the regional attempt to settle the Central American conflicts by negotiation instead of war. It is still not too late to make good on the claim.