Nicaragua Policy Is Beyond Redemption

The Reagan Administration’s efforts to overturn the Nicaraguan government have led it down bizarre paths. Profits earned from selling arms to Iran passed from one bank account to another until finally emerging as a kind of supplemental military appropriation for the contras. But Congress did not approve this transaction. Indeed, at that time, it expressly prohibited any military aid to the contras.

The decision to circumvent the law is a symptom of an obsession. The Administration has struggled mightily and without public support since 1982 to overthrow the Sandinista regime. Yet the harder it tried, the further it moved from its goal and the nation’s purpose. Using “all means” short of direct U.S. intervention, the Administration ignored and then violated international law. Now it appears to have broken U.S. law as well.

Nearly two-thirds of the American people oppose the program, and many in Congress see it as an albatross that is dragging U.S. interests in Central America down, much as the Bay of Pigs did in Cuba. Nevertheless, President Reagan was so adamant and effective that in June he persuaded Congress to approve $100 million for the contras, with 75% of that for arms. Reinforced, the contras were hoping to demonstrate their viability, for example by capturing a town. They expected the President to ask for more aid next spring and hoped to strengthen his position.

But two events in November--the arms scandal and the electoral shift in the Senate--will probably spell the end of U.S. support. The new Congress is less likely to be impressed by the contras’ battles than by the war’s brutality, the contras’ atrocities, the Administration’s unlawfulness and the strategy’s ineffectiveness.

The new Senate and the House will doggedly scrutinize the Administration’s strategy, and they will see that the illegal arms shipment was just one of many examples of a policy that lost its compass.

Since 1982, the Administration has provided more military aid to the contras than the United States provided to all the countries of Central America from 1962 to 1980. The Administration argued that the contras are valuable leverage for forcing Nicaragua to negotiate, but there have been no serious negotiations since 1981. Instead, since then, Nicaragua’s armed forces have increased four-fold. In 1980, Nicaragua received 850 tons of arms from the Soviet Bloc; in 1985, it received 18,000 tons, and thus far in 1986, 20,000 tons. Partly because of the U.S. embargo, the Nicaraguan economy has sunk into increasing dependency on the Soviet Union.

Since 1979, the Sandinistas had plans to expand their armed forces. Instead of impeding those plans, the U.S. arming of the counterrevolutionaries has made it easier to justify the Sandinistas’ militarism and anti-Americanism.

The Administration’s worst error is that it has promoted polarization in Nicaragua in an effort to transfer legitimacy from the government to the contras. It has encouraged many Nicaraguan moderates to leave and associate with the armed struggle rather than press for peaceful changes inside the country.

Here again, the Administration’s strategy has unwittingly helped the Sandinistas. Their revolutionary goal was demographically focused: to forget older Nicaraguans with bourgeois sentiments and concentrate on politicizing the youth. With a youthful population and a war against U.S. imperialism taking many lives, the Sandinista revolution is building its future and burying its past.

An internal opposition remains in Nicaragua, but as more leaders depart, it grows weaker each year. Many of this group believe in the ideals of the revolution, and they also believe in tolerance and the right to disagree. Some will still be there when the United States wakes up and stops supporting the armed struggle. At that point, their voices should be heard and magnified. Their lesson will have value in the United States as well as in Nicaragua.

“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil,” wrote Christopher Dawson during World War II, “then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.” In their struggles against evil, both the Reagan Administration and the Sandinistas have lost sight and touch with their original purposes--for the United States, it is a nation under law; for Nicaragua, it is the pursuit of justice.

An end to the contra program and a return to original purposes would be lessons worth drawing from the school for this current scandal.