COLUMN LEFT : Pull the Plug on Salvador’s No-Win War : Only a U.S. aid cut will get both sides to negotiate a peace.

After 10 years, Congress appears primed to cut military aid to El Salvador in another attempt to bring that country’s civil war to a negotiated peace. Legislation headed for House debate next week would cut half of the $85 million budgeted for this year and cancel the remainder if the Salvadoran government does not make progress on several fronts concerning peace and justice.

With all due respect to the proponents, this is just another halfway measure. It would only perpetuate the game-playing we’ve been mired in for the last decade. Our government must have the decency to drop the pretenses that it has used to sell its El Salvador policy. As a first step, we must tell the Salvadoran military that we’ve got their number, that we will no longer support their subversion of democracy.

The paralysis of the situation was made clear to Congress by a task force chaired by Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.), which reported that the official investigation into the murder of the six Jesuits last November has “come to a virtual standstill.” Although soldiers conducted the massacre of the priests and two employees at the Jesuit-run Central American University, there has been no effort to determine whether the armed forces high command played a role. Last weekend, it was reported that evidence crucial to the prosecution was missing, and that soldiers who were potential witnesses had been transferred abroad and were unavailable to testify.

That may be the last straw. Finally, our government may be persuaded to consider whether U.S. military assistance to El Salvador is in anyone’s best interest. A diplomatic settlement must be worked out. And negotiations toward such a settlement must be tied to a wider agreement for the whole of Central America.

The civil war in El Salvador is unwinnable. The army has not prevailed, even with billions of dollars of U.S. support, including state-of-the-art training and equipment. Similarly, the FMLN guerrillas have demonstrated that they are unable to win and cannot be defeated.

The alternative to a diplomatic settlement, therefore, is another decade of brutal violence that decides nothing.

All that Archbishop Oscar A. Romero predicted about the results of U.S. military aid has come true in spades. In February, 1980, Romero wrote to President Jimmy Carter begging him not to send military assistance to the government of El Salvador, warning that a blood bath would ensue. A month later, Romero himself was felled by an assassin’s bullet.

U.S. military assistance came nonetheless, in the form of advisers and training teams and money for aircraft, artillery, sophisticated weapons of war and ammunition. And the blood flowed. In 10 years, more than 70,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians, including infants and children and church workers and charity volunteers whose only offense was trying to care for the hungry, the orphaned, the sick.

The Jesuit priests and their housekeepers who were brutally murdered in November were not the last to be killed by bullets made in the U.S.A. In February, 16 children were among the civilians killed or maimed by an unprovoked Salvadoran Air Force attack on the village of Corral de Piedra in Chalatenango province.

President Alfredo Cristiani’s government has had a year in office to prove itself, and has been found wanting. The persistent abuses by the Salvadoran military, the mockery of justice, the refusal to pursue a non-military settlement of the civil war should be proof enough to anyone that our policy is on the wrong course.

Our government needs to get three messages across to the Salvadoran government and the military Establishment: First, we will no longer make excuses for their failings or finance their corrupt practices and human-rights abuses. Second, we will not waste the U.S. taxpayers’ money to feed the tragic illusion that there can be a military solution to El Salvador’s problems. Instead, our government will commit itself at the highest level to fostering a negotiated settlement as part of a wider diplomatic approach to security for the region as a whole. Finally, we are willing to participate in the development of a plan to replace the military aid with the economic assistance so desperately needed to address the causes of the conflict that is destroying El Salvador.