Keep the Contras, and the Heat, On : Give Peace Talks a Chance, but Let Sandinistas Be Forewarned

Since negotiations alone cannot reach a genuine solution in Central America and since a long-term U.S. military involvement is an unsatisfactory option, the only way to stop Sandinista aggression is to couple peace talks with renewed support for the anti-communist Contras.

Nicaragua’s communist leaders are fanatical men with conquest on their agenda. They are bent on bringing down all the fledgling democracies in Central America. We will not win them over with kindness. Unless the United States puts some kind of pressure on the Sandinistas, they will have no reason to change their policy of aggression through subversion.

The most frivolous argument against aid to the Contras is the chant of “No more Vietnams.” The way to avoid another Vietnam is to aid the Contras now, rather than to be faced later with the necessity to send in U.S. forces to eliminate a Soviet base in the Western Hemisphere.

There are those who say that the Contras have no chance to win. Whether they are right or wrong depends on the definition of victory. If it means marching on Managua in less than a year, they are right. If it means forcing the Sandinista leadership to negotiate a settlement, they are wrong.

With continued American support, Contra forces have the staying power to wage a prolonged guerrilla war of attrition. With over 20,000 troops in the field, the Contras already have a more powerful army than the Sandinistas did when the Somoza regime was toppled. Nicaragua’s regular army has about 60,000 troops and has received modern Soviet equipment. But it has not performed well in combat. Even when the Contras received no official U.S. military assistance, they were able to blunt the attack of Sandinista forces on Contra base camps in Honduras. Government units have failed to stop the Contras from infiltrating thousands of troops and tons of arms and ammunition into Nicaragua. The military bottom line is that Managua cannot prevent the Contras from undertaking a major guerrilla campaign.

If we give the Contras adequate support, the Sandinistas will not be able to count on the Soviet Union to come to the rescue. As the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated 25 years ago, Kremlin leaders would never risk a direct confrontation with the United States 10,000 miles away from the Soviet Union. They cannot project their conventional power over such great distances. And despite their increased nuclear capability compared with 1963, they are not going to risk nuclear war with the United States in order to save their clients in Managua. If push comes to shove, the Soviets will leave the Nicaraguan government to fend for itself. That fact creates major leverage for the United States.

We need to have a two-track policy. On the one hand, we should give the talks under the Arias plan a reasonable chance to succeed. On the other, however, our commitment to these negotiations cannot be open-ended. There must be a deadline. We must ensure that Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez and the other Central American leaders hold the Sandinistas’ feet to the fire on the crucial issue of establishing a genuine democracy in Nicaragua. We should also insist that Nicaragua scale down its enormous armed forces and that its huge shipments of Soviet bloc weapons be discontinued. For the Soviets alone to discontinue their aid would not be enough. Cuba and the other communist bloc countries would pick up the slack.

If the negotiations fail on these points, we must be prepared to move to the second track: military pressure on Managua.

We must be realistic about the motivations behind the political maneuvering of the Sandinistas. They have one objective in mind: to disband the Contras. American political figures who meet with Sandinista leaders and who then prattle about how sincerely the Nicaraguans want peace are unbelievably naive. Daniel Ortega and his sidekicks want peace only if it means a victory of his communist government over his anti-communist opposition.

Sandinista leaders have adopted a shrewd political strategy. They want to create the appearance of political progress in Nicaragua in order to induce Congress to cut off funding to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters. As a result, they have released about 1,000 political prisoners, permitted the church radio station to resume broadcasting, allowed the newspaper La Prensa to reopen and even entered indirect negotiations with the Contras. But the Sandinistas still hold more than 4,000 political prisoners, prohibit news programs on the church radio station and censor the press. Most important, in their indirect talks the Sandinistas are willing to discuss only the terms of surrender for the Contras, rather than sitting down to work out the procedures for instituting democratic elections.

To counter this, the Reagan Administration should set a date on which to ask Congress for new assistance for the Contras and then stick to it. That is needed to pressure the Sandinistas in the negotiating process and to prepare for the likely event that the talks will fail. Those in Congress who want to kill the cause of democracy in Nicaragua should keep in mind that whenever the legislative branch seizes the executive’s authority over foreign affairs, they will be held responsible for the consequences.

If the Arias plan fails, we must support the Contras--and on a far larger scale than we have so far done. But we should not leave the defense of our critical interests in Central America solely in the hands of a proxy force like the Contras. We should use our own forces to quarantine Nicaragua. We should prevent its expansionist and repressive communist government from receiving further shipments of arms and supplies from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Since they came to power the Sandinistas have been igniting fires throughout Central America. It makes no sense for the United States to run around putting out the fires while allowing the arsonists to continue to get their hands on the supplies to light still more.

We must declare a new version of the Monroe Doctrine. We should state that the United States will resist intervention in Latin America, not only by foreign governments but also by Latin American governments controlled by foreign powers. A military quarantine of Nicaragua would be part of that policy. It would prevent Managua from subverting our friends in the region. It would also enable the Contras to put the greatest pressure in the shortest time on the Sandinistas to agree to a settlement creating a genuine democratic process in Nicaragua, which is the only viable long-term solution to the crisis in Central America.