White House Hysteria

The intensity of President Reagan’s rhetoric on the issue of continued aid for Nicaragua’s Contra rebels betrays anxiety, if not panic, within the White House as the Feb. 3 vote in the House of Representatives approaches.

Reagan has spoken almost daily on the issue, and plans further discourses. The White House staff, we are told, will make this a priority issue in the days before the vote. The President clearly sees this as a crucial test of his authority. In fact, it is an even more critical test of his judgment.

The security of the Western Hemisphere is at stake, the President has told us. Peace in Central America hangs in the balance, he reports. Spreading communism in Central America threatens Mexico and ultimately the southern border of the United States, jeopardizing vital sea lanes as the Gulf of Mexico is subsumed by the Persian Gulf’s anarchy. No wonder the White House dismisses its critics as defeatists ready to have “freedom fighters” surrender to Moscow’s agents.

This horrific vision, almost a matter of religion with the radical right in the United States, is not shared by many scholars or experts on the region, and, significantly, it is not shared by most Latin Americans. Reagan has chosen to ignore the counsel of the experts and the advice of the Latin Americans, however, in his single-minded pursuit of a military solution to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

The terrible risk now is that the President’s stubborn implementation of his own policy will wreck the peace plan that the five presidents of Central America have put together. They themselves have indicated that resumed Contra aid would doom the pact. It certainly would justify a restoration of the state of emergency and the campaign of repression that the Sandinistas have waged on the basis of the guerrilla war being waged against them with U.S. arms in Nicaragua.

Reagan has argued that the pressure of the Contras brought Managua to the negotiating table. Events suggest otherwise. It was the genius of the peace plan, contrived by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, that brought the new prospect of a negotiated peace. In the words of Abraham F. Lowenthal, the distinguished Latin America expert at USC, “Seven years of the Contra war had not achieved what diplomatic and political pressures have produced in five months.”

Congress alone can rescue the United States from Reagan’s blunder by refusing more aid for the Contras. Only in that way can the peace plan be preserved and tested. It may not, in the end, succeed. But nothing else holds half the promise that it does at this moment.