The Contra War and U.S. National Security
T HE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION HAS LONG
been in the grip of an obsession with Nicaragua. In
its recent fight with Congress to secure approval for $14
million in aid to the contras, the administration’s hatred
for the Sandinista regime has produced some of the ugliest
invective heard in Washington in years. It has shamelessly
bullied its congressional opponents, played on their fear of
being blamed for allowing a “second Cuba” in Latin
America and skillfully exploited the Democrats’ dearth of
alternative policy options.
As we go to press, it remains to be seen whether the ad-
ministration will win its case. Some optimists calculate
that there is still a 50-vote margin against the aid; pes-
simists say the gap could be as low as seven or eight. If it
glimpses defeat, the administration may end up pulling
out of the vote altogether. It would then seek one of a
number of compromise solutions: perhaps so-called
humanitarian aid to Nicaraguan refugees, perhaps aid
through third parties and private donors.
In the course of the debate, many members of Congress
have been rethinking their opposition to the contras. Some
waverers may have been tempted to change their votes in
the hope that the Nicaragua nightmare will go away if they
accept the contras as the de facto core of U.S. policy.
They may also have grasped at the illusion that the con-
tras’ purpose was moral because it was directed at secur-
ing peace.
The doubters may have been swayed by a spate of fresh
arguments in favor of aid to the contras, more subtle than
the administration’s own overheated rhetoric. Two recent
articles from one-time critics of administration policy
were characteristic of this trend. One was an op-ed piece
in the March 12 New York Times by Susan Kaufman Pur-
cell of the Council on Foreign Relations. The other was a
March 25 editorial in The New Republic-the staple opin-
ion-former these days for every disenchanted liberal in
Washington.
The Kaufman Purcell argument rests on the assumption
that continued pressure by the contras will extract more
and more concessions from the Sandinistas, leading even-
tually to a negotiated settlement through the Contadora
process. The New Republic piece is in some ways more
pernicious. Like Kaufman Purcell, it sees the contras as
an instrument toward the higher good-which in the The
New Republic’s case seems to mean bringing Arturo Cruz
into the Nicaraguan government.
Both these approaches brazen out the mounting evi-
dence of systematic atrocities by the contras, especially
the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), against
Nicaragua’s civilian population. The New Republic even
admits disarmingly that to describe the contras as “free-
dom fighters” is “romantic myth-making.” But, it con-
tinues, “What is happening in Nicaragua . . . is a civil
war-and like most civil wars it is a nasty affair.” In the
eyes of The New Republic, then, the recent Americas
Watch report* which provides a nauseating catalogue of
FDN rape, torture and indiscriminate butchery, and finds
no significant evidence of Sandinista abuses since 1982,
should not unduly disturb the unquiet liberal conscience.
War is hell, and U.S. national security is at stake. Or, as
they used to say in the good old days, “They may be sons
of bitches, but they’re our sons of bitches.” (For a pun-
gent contemporary variant on that theme, see Jerry Fal-
well’s remark in this issue’s “On the Record.”)
WHATEVER THE OUTCOME OF THE DE-
bate, its impact will be a lasting one. This aid re-
quest is significantly different from its predecessors. More
than just another incremental step in the hostilities against
Nicaragua, the vote this time represents a major watershed
in U.S.-Nicaraguan relations. The administration has had
a remarkable degree of success in fanning congressional
hostility toward the Sandinistas. If Reagan succeeds in
getting the $14 million, he will have obliged Congress to
underwrite his overall goal-which is now explicitly
stated-of overthrowing a regime which is deemed to be a
threat to U.S. national security. But far from promoting
U.S. national security interests, a continuation of the con-
tra war against Nicaragua will in fact prejudice those in-
terests in several ways.
First, renewed harassment may well convince
Nicaragua that it is pointless to go on making unilateral
gestures of conciliation. Second, the contra war is likely
to kill the Contadora peace initiative. And third, it will
push the United States closer to direct military involve-
ment in Central America.
To start with the second point, renewal of aid to the
contras would lead to a serious deterioration in hemi-
spheric relations. Already, Honduras has been destabilized
by acting as a staging ground for the war. Its political sys-
tem is in disarray; many of its generals are close to open
revolt against Washington. The war now shows signs of
shifting to Costa Rica, with the arrival of the ultra-rightist
Lewis Tambs as new U.S. ambassador in San Jos6. It is
only too easy to foresee the erosion of Costa Rica’s fragile
stability.
The four Contadora nations-all key U.S. allies-
would see a renewal of funding as the final blow to their
peace initiative. The contra war means a U.S. resolve to
flout all the central security provisions of Contadora,
above all its condemnation of foreign support for “irregu-
lar” military forces and cross-border attacks on sovereign
states. The failure of this unprecedented diplomatic initia-
tive by Latin American governments would also have
grave implications for the future viability of the Organiza-
tion of American States.
The hemispheric strain will also be felt at the level of
mass opinion. The war on Nicaragua, like U.S. support
for Great Britain in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict and
the invasion of Grenada, is turning a groundswell of
nationalistic sentiment fiercely against the United States.
The recent inauguration of Uruguayan President Julio
Marfa Sanguinetti, a civilian, brought a huge demonstra-
MARCHIAPR!L 19853
3 MARCH/APRIL 1985tion of public support for Nicaragua. As one well-placed
Latin American observer said, “Who received Shultz
when he arrived in Montevideo? Two Mercedes and 600
bodyguards. Who received Daniel Ortega? Three hundred
thousand people.” Washington ignores signals like this at
its peril.
Beyond the hemisphere, too, Washington’s alliances
will suffer. Many key Western countries saw the
November election in Nicaragua as a ratification of the
Sandinistas’ legitimacy; their hostility to a contra-based
policy will grow. Even Margaret Thatcher gave a surpris-
ingly cordial welcome to Nicaraguan Vice President Ser-
gio Ramirez when he passed through London in February.
A S FOR THE REACTIONS OF NICARAGUA
itself, the Sandinistas will likely see a resumption
of contra aid not as one more turn of the screw, but as a
critical turning point. It is absurd to argue that continued
funding of the contras is the only thing that will oblige the
Sandinistas to acknowledge legitimate U.S. national secu-
rity interests. The Sandinistas have long recognized those
interests, both in the Contadora framework and in the
bilateral U.S.-Nicaraguan talks at Manzanillo, which the
administration unilaterally abandoned.
With their readiness to sign the draft Contadora treaty
last September, the Sandinistas explicitly addressed the is-
sues of foreign bases and advisers and limits on the size of
armed forces and military actions across national fron-
tiers. Washington was alarmed that those terms could
apply across the board, restricting its own military pres-
ence in Honduras and El Salvador, and pressed its allies in
Central America to torpedo the treaty; Managua now says
it is open to the argument that, for example, a permanent
military base in Honduras might also be added to the list
of legitimate U.S. security concerns.
It would he naive to deny the link between U.S. pres-
sure and Sandinista concessions. But the elementary rules
of schoolyard bullying may soon cease to apply. It is a
serious mistake to assume that the Sandinistas will con-
tinue to make concessions indefinitely as more pressure is
exerted on them. One major motive for the Sandinistas’
gestures has been to stay the hand of Congress on the con-
tra vote: that restraint would be futile-if not suicidal-if
the aid request were granted.
Also, unilateral concessions are always a political risk.
At a certain point, those who make conciliatory gestures
only to see them systematically spurned begin to look
foolish to their own supporters. We may have now
reached that point, where the most pragmatic course for
the Sandinistas is to stand firm. After all, their credibility
with their domestic constituency is at stake. As Sergio
Ramirez recently stressed, conciliation without reciproc-
ity eventually becomes meaningless.
Finally, the most obvious reaction to military pressure
is military buildup. In response to the contra attacks, the
Sandinistas will continue to acquire weapons, most likely
from the Soviet bloc. And they may see no further sense in
their unilateral offer to suspend the import of new
weapons systems.
The Sandinistas’ increased defense preparedness-
based, incidentally, on distributing 200,000 machine guns
to the civilian population-is habitually interpreted in this
country as evidence of an “authoritarian crackdown” at
home. Again, the evidence suggests just the opposite. The
months since the November elections have seen a radical
decentralization and democratization of politics at the
grassroots and a vibrant daily debate in the National As-
sembly between the FSLN and its opponents.
WHAT IS TO HAPPEN THEN IF THE CONTRA
aid goes through? Even Business Week, in an un-
usually astute column, recognized that if Congress ap-
proves the $14 million aid request, it will be cornered. It
will have endorsed the president’s obsessional vision of
Nicaragua as a threat to national security and will be com-
mitted to following through on the military logic of the
contras-whose chances of eventual military success
against the heavily armed Nicaraguans are universally
agreed to be nil.
That is precisely the point at which the logic of Vietnam
takes over, with the seductive argument that “We have to
go in because we are already there.” If Congress sticks
with the contras now, it must also be prepared to stick
with the consequences-a national security nightmare of
ever deeper proportions.
If Congress’s remaining qualms about these murderous
thugs lead it to block the aid request, then we may face a
turning point in U.S. policy of a more optimistic kind.
The administration’s policy will, by the admission of its
own senior officials, begin to unravel. So far, the adminis-
tration has had the Democrats over a barrel. But the spell
cast by the president’s bullying and the Democrats’ cow-
ardice can now perhaps be broken. If Congress cuts loose
from the contra policy, the Democrats-admittedly
through little merit of their own-will have a little space
to stake out the alternative policy approach that is so des-
perately needed.
Their first step must be to confront the most dangerous
of Reagan’s many lies: his recent assertion that the San-
dinistas “are not a government.” That means recognizing
that Nicaragua is indeed a sovereign state, with which the
United States has no right to interfere. If that minimum
standard of international behavior is restored to the de-
bate, more may follow. Once Congress stops looking at
Nicaragua through a national security prism, it may under-
stand that the Sandinistas’ only real crime in the first place
is to have demanded sovereignty. And if that subversive
truth is acknowledged? Is it too much to hope that one or
two lone voices may begin to advance morality, rather
than the paranoia of empire, as the basis of this country’s
Central America policy?
*Americas Watch, Violations of the Laws of War by Both
Sides in Nicaragua 1981-1985, New York, March 1985.
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