Reagan Tips His Hand

President Reagan may have said more than he meant to when he launched a new campaign to scare Congress into paying for his war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

White House aides are talking about giving close to $100 million this year to rebels, the so-called contras, who are fighting the Nicaraguan government. About $30 million would be for humanitarian aid, roughly the same amount Reagan gave the contras last year. The rest of the money would be “unrestricted.” Reagan asked Republican Congressional leaders in a Tuesday meeting to “lift the restrictions which now tie our hands.” That seems to be a revealing choice of words.

When he is ad libbing, Reagan often loses small struggles with the English language, making it hard to know whether he means what he says. But his reference to “our hands” rather than to the contras could mean that Reagan wants to return to policies of the early days of his Administration, when the covert war against Nicaragua was carried out not by surrogates but directly by the Central Intelligence Agency. One restriction on contra aid that the White House wants lifted is a congressional resolution that bars the CIA from helping overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

Reagan forgets, however, that the CIA’s covert war was no more successful in undermining the Sandinistas than the campaign of bloody harassment now being waged by the contras. In fact, all Reagan’s futile war has done is strengthened the hand of Sandinista hard-liners in cracking down on their own people while weakening the hand of Latin American nations trying to settle Central America’s crisis through negotiations.

This country’s allies in the Contadora Group (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama) want to contain the Sandinista revolution as much as Reagan does, and they have a smarter plan for doing so. They want the Nicaraguans to sign a peace treaty agreeing to halt their military buildup and to expel their Soviet bloc advisers in exchange for a guarantee that their 1979 revolution will not be undermined.

Once the Contadora Group succeeds, the Latin Americans will have the Sandinistas in a diplomatic box. The Soviets, after all, can only give them arms. For help in rebuilding Nicaragua’s war-ravaged economy, the Sandinistas will have to look to their neighbors in the Western Hemisphere--the Contadora Group and important countries that support Contadora, like Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay. They will even have to look to the United States. When that happens, the Sandinistas can be won over by the things free and democratic nations are best equipped to provide--not covert terror campaigns, but real humanitarian assistance and aid for economic development.

But before that can happen, the Sandinistas must be convinced to lower their guard. They won’t do that while Reagan is taking futile swings at them. That is why the Contadora nations blame the United States, not Nicaragua, for stalling their peace negotiations. Reagan shows no inclination to change course, so Congress must keep his hands tied, and firmly.