Reckless and Wrong

President Reagan’s key advisers on Latin America, encouraged by bipartisan congressional support for spreading guerrilla warfare against Marxist regimes on three continents, are drawing plans to double the forces of the contras fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. It is a reckless and mistaken proposal that risks terrible consequences for Central America.

One thing that makes this all the more alarming is the present climate in Washington, where Democrats, in a panic lest they be perceived as soft on communism when the next election comes, and moderate Republicans, perhaps beset by the same fears, have yielded to the war cries from the White House, sometimes outshouting the President.

The diagnosis is as inaccurate as the proposed treatment is counterproductive. “We consider the problem in Central America basically to be Nicaragua, as supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz has said. He was wrong, absolutely wrong, and that simplistic rhetoric only makes a solution more elusive. The problem in Central America is one of historic injustice and depredation, much of it by the United States. The problem in Nicaragua is the inheritance of decades of collusion between U.S. businessmen and political leaders on the one hand and the ruthless Somoza dictatorship.

To make Nicaragua and its Marxist rulers the central issue ignores deeply alarming issues in neighboring states, including the continuing brutality and repression in Guatemala and the frustration of negotiations in the civil war in El Salvador. To make an American commitment of arms to an uprising in Nicaragua is to raise awesome risks. Such a move gives license to Managua to enlarge its already excessive arsenal and its already oversize corps of foreign advisers. It gives legitimacy to defensive actions by Nicaragua against Costa Rica and Honduras, from which the American-sponsored guerrilla war is being mounted. Cross-border action by Nicaraguan troops, however justifiable in self-defense, would likely be the flash-point excusing the intervention of U.S. troops.

Elliott Abrams, the new assistant secretary of state for Latin America, has now said that the Sandinistas who govern Nicaragua “must be removed.” He has reached this conclusion on the ground that they are both Marxists and unpopular. Certainly some are Marxists, and perhaps they control the situation in that pathetic nation. But the elections last year gave the presidency of Nicaragua a legitimacy enjoyed by only two other presidents in the area. Abrams’ argument is utterly devoid of evidence that the Sandinistas are a threat to U.S. national security--the only circumstance that would justify the invocation of the 1947 Treaty of Rio.

The things wrong with Nicaragua are not going to be solved by civil war, by salvos from the 16-inch guns of U.S. battleships, by “surgical” bombing raids on training camps or by an invasion, on the Grenada model, by U.S. special forces and paratroopers.

Much is wrong, that is clear. The Sandinista revolution has been corrupted by those who now rule. They have sought to export their revolution to at least one other nation, although they had agreed to an end to that just at the point when Washington chose to break off bilateral negotiations. They could unbalance the fragile security of all of Central America should they move to import advanced military aircraft and other instruments of aggression.

But the way to address those problems is in a regional context, in association with all the nations --including the four Contadora peace makers. Unilateral intervention by a truculent and trigger-happy Uncle Sam might delight some U.S. citizens --frustrated by events, eager for easy answers--but elsewhere in the hemisphere it would only serve to reaffirm the worst fears, reviving images of a Rough Rider again in the saddle and the neo-colonialism of banana plantations.

There is no question that people in the United States are shocked and disappointed by developments in Nicaragua. The idealism proclaimed in July, 1979, seems betrayed. But that disappointment should not be translated by ideology-driven zealots or timid politicians into a declaration of war, either by proxy or by U.S. troops. Recourse to arms only symbolizes a bankruptcy of intelligent diplomacy, an abandonment of principles, an ignorance of reality and, above all, a neglect of what really needs to be done.