Why Congress Should Approve Contra Aid

By Strobe Talbott

Politics is the art of the possible, and policy is a way of defining a problem so that it can be solved. By that definition, the Administration and the Congress have yet to produce sound politics or successful policy in response to the ongoing crisis in Nicaragua. The White House and Capitol Hill have both reverberated with one-sided and unrealistic assessments of the challenge in Nicaragua, with deceptive and diversionary claims about what the U.S. should be trying to accomplish there and with unconvincing recipes for what to do. The result is an impasse that may come to a head this week, one from which the Sandinistas themselves may emerge the only winners.

The Administration's position is that the Sandinistas are, in a word that Secretary of State George Shultz has used repeatedly, "unacceptable." The implication not only of that word but of much of the accompanying policy is that the Sandinistas must go. The Administration's chosen instrument for attaining that goal is a U.S.-backed guerrilla war waged by the contras. The President's go-for-broke campaign on behalf of the contras seems to court defeat both in Washington, at the hands of an increasingly recalcitrant Congress, and in Nicaragua itself, at the hands of the Sandinistas. That is partly because the policy has taken on an all-or-nothing quality: either the U.S. succeeds in bringing about the overthrow of the Sandinistas, or there will be hell to pay both geopolitically (Central America will be awash, in Reagan's colorful phrase, in a "sea of red") and politically here at home (the President's political operatives are already eager to ask voters next November, "Who lost Nicaragua?"). American inability to cope conclusively with such an antagonistic regime so close to home would certainly carry a price, potentially a heavy one. But the means to get rid of the Sandinistas are slim and risky. Since the Congress, much of the public and many independent experts doubt that the contras can achieve all that they and their Administration sponsors want, there is a growing temptation to give them nothing, not even the relatively piddling $100 million that President Reagan is asking for, or to give them so little, so late, that it would be meaningless. On the eve of the President's speech appealing for the contra cause, which was scheduled for last Sunday night, a majority of the House, faced with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down choice, was leaning toward a cutoff of all U.S. aid to the contras and a pious but toothless exhortation to diplomacy.

What is needed, at this late and perhaps last-minute juncture, is for the Administration to redefine the problem in Nicaragua in a way that it can be solved, through diplomacy as well as military pressure, and then for the Congress to support the contras as a goad to diplomacy and to do so without attaching conditions that would mitigate or eliminate the pressure they actually exert on the Sandinistas.

The starting point for a fresh approach has to be a consensus about what Shultz's depiction of the Sandinistas as unacceptable means, not in terms of anyone's tastes and preferences but in terms of a policy that can be carried out in the real world: What is it that the U.S. cannot accept about the junta in Managua? And what must the U.S. do to transform the Sandinista regime into something the U.S. can live with?

Administration officials--indeed, most Americans--object with good reason to the way the Sandinistas are repressing their citizens and betraying earlier promises of pluralism and democracy. Of course, official American outrage over the abuse of human and civil rights in Nicaragua would have more force, both within the U.S. and in the international arena, if Washington had not for so many decades countenanced a dictator in Managua as long as he was, in Franklin Roosevelt's famous description of Anastasio Somoza, "our son of a bitch."

The U.S.'s principal objection is to the Sandinistas' close ties with the Soviet Union and the threat they pose directly to neighboring states and indirectly to the U.S. itself. The internal and external policies of the Sandinistas are intimately linked. They are allying themselves with the Soviet Union for the simple reason that they are bent on remaking Nicaraguan society in the Soviet image. Daniel Ortega makes no bones about what he and his companeros hope to accomplish--and with whose help. Nor are American conservatives the only ones whom the Sandinistas have dismayed and provoked to militant resistance. The junta's relentless, often brutal consolidation of power and erection of a police state have driven some of their original confreres first into the opposition and now into the contra leadership. Similarly, the Sandinistas have no one but themselves to blame for alienating formerly sympathetic American specialists and European social democrats.

Until now, the Reagan Administration has been bent on bringing the Sandinistas to heel--making them cry "uncle," as Reagan put it--in both their internal and external behavior, although the Administration has been disingenuous and inconsistent in what it has said publicly. The President and his aides used to justify the contras as a way of interdicting arms that the Sandinistas were sending to the Salvadoran leftist guerrillas. More recently, Washington has explained the contra campaign as a means to achieve internal political reform: through the pressure of the contras, the U.S. will force the Sandinistas to the negotiating table; then, continued pressure will induce them to make concessions to the democratic opposition and accede to elections in which the opposition will win and the Sandinistas will lose (unlike the elections in November 1984, which were structured in such a way that the opposition dropped out of the running).

The problem with that scenario is that for all the reasons Shultz considers the Sandinistas unacceptable--i.e., their despotic philosophy and methods--they will not negotiate away their hold on power. Shultz knows that. So did his predecessor, Alexander Haig, who spoke in 1981 about dealing with the Soviet-Cuban threat in the hemisphere "at the source." All along, the Administration's real objective has been quite simply to throw the bums out.

If $500 million or a cool billion, never mind the paltry $100 million that the Administration is asking for, would achieve that end, it would be money well spent. But few experts think the contras can either defeat the Sandinistas militarily or force them into negotiations where they can be defeated politically.

Both sides in the Great Contra Debate are using as a scare tactic the possibility that the U.S. might have to intervene directly in Nicaragua. Opponents of the Administration have warned for years that the contras are the forerunners of American troops. Now, just in the past few weeks, Reagan, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan have turned the argument around, invoking the specter of G.I.s in the jungle as something that no one wants to see but that might be required down the road if the Congress defies the President now. Sooner or later, they say, someone has to do to the Sandinistas what they did to the Somocistas--drive them out of Managua--and if the contras can't, the job may fall to the 82nd Airborne.

The Administration is quite right not to rule out the use of American military force in Central America. The U.S. must keep all its enemies guessing in this respect, from the Soviet Union to two-bit muggers in the back alleys of the Third World. But the political wisdom of "threatening" Congress with the prospect of American military intervention was dubious. It invited a chain of tough questions that only put the Administration more on the defensive at a time when it needs to close partisan ranks: What if the Congress goes along with the White House, but the contras still fail? What if the Sandinistas will yield to their enemies neither at the bargaining table nor on the battlefield? Might the U.S. face an unhappy choice: accepting defeat and humiliation by proxy, or having to come to the rescue of its proxies with its own troops? Then the U.S. could find itself bogged down in a messy war and torn apart in an even messier domestic debate.

Somewhere between the Administration's ill-disguised desire to back the contras as a means of over throwing the Sandinistas and the Congress's temptation to consign them to a quick defeat by pulling the plug on U.S. support, there are at least two other courses of action. One is for the U.S. to support the contras indefinitely as a way of distracting and bleeding the Sandinistas. Even if the contras cannot win militarily, perhaps they could provide insurance that the regime would be too busy at home to make mischief abroad.

There are strong arguments for that idea, but also some serious problems. For one, the contras cannot be expected to fight indefinitely without realistic hope of victory. They and their country are different in key ways from the mujahedin in Afghanistan, who are fighting to expel 100,000 alien infidels, and Jonas Savimbi's forces in Angola, who, unlike the contras, control the territory from which they operate.

Even if the contras were willing to persist in a guerrilla war, there is doubt that U.S. opinion would persist in backing them. The current wrangle over aid to the contras is all too typical of what happens when the American political system tries to cope with a controversial foreign entanglement that does not promise clear or early results.

If and when the contra campaign finally petered out, the Sandinistas would probably have accumulated an arsenal of East bloc arms far beyond even what they have now; they would have succeeded in militarizing the society even further, perversely helped by the pretext of the civil war; and they would have built up an even greater grudge against Tio Sam, hence an even greater incentive to go to work on their rather fragile neighbors.

Of course, the Sandinistas already have an inclination to go after their neighbors. That is the principal drawback of the fourth option, which is to keep the contra campaign going long enough to bring about a diplomatic solution. Like their mentor in Moscow, Soviet-style regimes are generically determined at least to neutralize, better yet to destabilize, and ideally to communize other states. They wage war abroad, either outright or by more covert means, for the same reason that they oppress internal opposition: because it is opposition, and because they are totalitarian. Genuine live-and-let-live peaceful coexistence is as alien to a Marxist-Leninist foreign policy as power sharing is to Marxism-Leninism on the home front. The Sandinistas show no sign of being an exception to this rule.

That is a large part of why the Administration has paid only lip service to the diplomatic option to date. But there are even greater disadvantages to the alternatives now available: pursuit of a military victory; abrupt abandonment of the contras, toward which Congress now seems inclined; and an open-ended civil war, which might wear down American will before it wears down the junta in Managua.

Besides, the Administration has not really pursued a diplomatic solution in a serious and realistic way. Whenever the Sandinistas have put a card on the table, the Administration has upped the ante, asking the Sandinistas to negotiate away their power within the country, which they are simply not going to do.

What they might conceivably do, however, is sign an agreement that would trade away their license--and at least some of their wherewithal--to follow the Soviet pattern of behavior outside their borders. Elements of such a deal are at hand in the Contadora proposal, which calls for the reduction of the Sandinista armed forces, the withdrawal of Soviet and Cuban military advisers and a ban on the export of revolution. The Sandinistas have hinted they might be willing to accept something along those lines. Even some Administration officials believe the Sandinistas might pay that price to get the contras off their--backs.

Meanwhile, Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte has offered to conduct parallel negotiations with the leftists he is fighting, as part of a broader settlement whereby the Sandinistas would negotiate with the contras to end the civil war. The contra leaders have endorsed the Contadora and the Duarte initiatives, and Reagan reiterated his own support for both when appointing veteran Troubleshooter Philip Habib as his special envoy for Central America two weeks ago.

A genuine coordination of the contra policy with the Contadora process, the Duarte initiative and the Habib mission is the best of several troublesome choices, and it is worth more of a try than the U.S. has been willing to make to date. Faced as it is with a near mutiny on Capitol Hill, the Administration may have little choice but to convert the diplomatic option from a fig leaf for the military option into a good-faith effort.

Even if a settlement along the Contadora lines were achieved, it would be extremely difficult to monitor and enforce, and the U.S. might be left with few cards in the future once the contras were out of the picture. Achieving the settlement in the first place would be difficult enough under any circumstances. It would probably be downright impossible without the stick of the contras to go along with the carrot of diplomacy. That is why the Congress should approve the Administration's contra aid package, and it should do so without attaching any of the strings that have been proposed, such as escrowing the aid in order to "give peace a chance" or setting a deadline for the diplomats to reach a deal. Any such conditions would serve only to tell the Sandinistas that they have nothing to worry about. It would embolden them to go through the charade of serious negotiations while waiting for the deadline to expire. In fact, if there is to be a deadline, it should probably work the other way: while the U.S. makes a good-faith effort at diplomacy, it should hold open the possibility of what Shultz calls, with an ambiguity that is as prudent and deliberate as it is ominous, "sterner measures" later on, if the Sandinistas prove intransigent or if they violate the agreements they sign. --By Strobe Talbott