Essay: Should the U.S. Support the Contras?

Round 6, is it? President Reagan wants $105 million from Congress for next year’s aid for the Nicaraguan contras. Congressionial Democrats are moving now to block $40 million of this year’s aid. We revisit the debate that will not die: Should the U.S. support the Nicaraguan resistance?

Congress is hardly the most finely honed instrument for making decisions of this kind. On the question of contra aid, Congress has returned answers, consecutively, of yes, yes, no, a bit, and — last year — yes again. (It was during the two years of “no” and “a bit” — 1984 through 1986, when Congress first banned all aid, then only military aid — that Colonel North sought to circumvent Congress by funneling aid from other sources, including the Iran arms sale.) Lyndon Johnson once reminded critics that he was the only President we had. This is the only Congress we have. And by 1986 it did appear as if Congress had crossed a divide. After lengthy debate, both Houses voted military aid to the contras.

The Iran-contra affair shouldn’t change all that, but it probably will. Less than three hours after Attorney General Meese had announced the discovery of the diversion of Iran arms funds to the contras, Senator David Durenburger of Minnesota, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared, “It’s going to be a cold day in Washington, D.C., before any more money goes to Nicaragua.”

This even before it was known whether or not the contra forces had seen any of the diverted money. This even before it was known whether the contras were even aware that funds were being illegally diverted for their benefit. What was known for more than a year was that the contras were the beneficiaries of some kind of supply operation run with a wink and a nod from the Administration. It was assumed that this was funded by “private” sources and possibly from money from third-party governments. And until Meese revealed that some money had also been skimmed from the Iran arms sales, this assumption aroused very little protest from Congress. Are the contras to be punished because they did not suspect an Iranian connection, something that, throughout November, no one in Congress (or in the press, for that matter) suspected?

But the gathering sentiment to reverse aid derives less from a desire to punish the contras than from a desire to punish the Administration. Of course, the Administration deserves to be punished. For the negligence of those who were ignorant or willed themselves into ignorance over the Iran arms affair. And for the lawlessness of those who actually carried out an operation designed to contravene congressional will.

But how to punish? Wounding a President by reversing his most cherished foreign policy goal is an understandable political instinct. But if it wounds the country, it is a bad one. Congress had come to the view that contra aid was in the national interest. It remains so. Abandoning that interest to get to a President is a high price to pay for sweet revenge.

The case for (and indeed, the case against) the contras remains utterly unchanged by the North affair. Now as before, the case for the contras rests on two pillars. One strategic and the other ideological — moral, if you will.

For a century and a half the extraordinary security of the American mainland owed much to the fact that the U.S. resisted, under the Monroe Doctrine, any great-power penetration of its own hemisphere. For the past 40 years that local security has enabled the U.S. to look abroad and take responsibility for a vast alliance. Cuba was the first great breach in the Monroe Doctrine, and it has indeed complicated the U.S. strategic position not only in the Americas, where Cuba has actively engaged in the attempted destabilization of one country after another, but as far away as Africa, where Cuban troops serve as a Soviet foreign legion.

The Soviet bloc is now in the process of consolidating a second base in the Americas, this time on the mainland, in contiguity with Costa Rica and ultimately Panama to the south, and with Honduras, El Salvador and ultimately Mexico to the north. That the Sandinista revolution is without frontiers is not a hypothetical notion. It is historical. In the first years of their rule the Sandinistas poured considerable effort into the Salvadoran insurgency, which hoped to pull off a victory before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. That attempt failed, but not for lack of trying. The Sandinistas have been more restrained in their support of the Salvadoran guerrillas during the Reagan Administration, not because of a change of heart but as a direct result of the military pressure that the U.S. has brought to bear during that time. Pressure in the form of the contras.

What is the strategic case against supporting a resistance that is trying to prevent the consolidation of a second Cuba? Some isolationists might argue that the “loss” of Third World countries does not really matter, and that we can sit behind a palisade of 10,000 nuclear warheads and not care who controls Central America. But the main opposition case is different. It does matter, say the Democrats. And the Sandinistas, they concede in speech after speech, are indeed Marxist-Leninist, expansionist, and pro-Soviet. But they can be contained by American power.

Tom Wicker, an articulate spokesman for the anti-contra view, put the case for containment: “Washington could state plainly that it will not tolerate any Soviet military base in Nicaragua, or any overt or covert attempt by Nicaragua to attack its neighbors.” Now, what exactly does “will not tolerate” mean? One cannot just say it. Carter declared the Soviet brigade in Cuba intolerable. Reagan declared the crackdown on Polish Solidarity intolerable. And the intolerable endured, despite the brave words. To be serious about containing Sandinista subversion — overt and covert — will mean vigilance, resources and risk. It will mean everything from pouring aid into El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica to establishing a ring of American bases around the border of Nicaragua; even, as Walter Mondale suggested during the 1984 campaign, to setting up a naval blockade to contain the Sandinistas. But why is it preferable so hugely to commit American resources? To station permanently American troops to serve as a trip wire? (That is how containment works in Europe: the principal function of American soldiers in forward positions is to die and thus bring the U.S. into any European war the Soviets might be tempted to start.) And if a blockade ever became necessary, the U.S. would risk confrontation not just with Nicaraguan forces but with Soviet forces as well. Why is that strategically preferable to supporting 15,000 Nicaraguans themselves prepared to fight to reclaim their country?

Because, say the critics, the contras cannot do the job. They cannot win. How these experts divine the outcome of civil wars is hard to fathom. The contras have more than twice the recruits the Sandinistas had when they overthrew Somoza. Which side is today more popular? It is hard to find out in a dictatorship. But it is worth noting that the Sandinistas have a conscript army, while the contras are a volunteer force.

The contras do have severe problems. They are in the midst of another agonizing reorganization, as the liberal civilian leadership tries, with U.S. support, to gain control over the military (not an uncommon problem, incidentally, for American friends from the Philippines to Guatemala). Critics point to the lack of significant contra military gains until now as proof that they cannot win. Perhaps. But it is equally possible that the lack of success has to do with two years of a grossly unbalanced arms race between the contras and the Sandinistas. Such imbalances are not rectified overnight, nor do they lend themselves to military spectaculars by the disarmed party. Guerrilla war requires arms, training and, above all, time for building an infrastructure in the countryside. The Sandinistas were in the field for 17 years before their victory over Somoza.

Some immediate visible success may be less a military than a political necessity for the contras. As Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, if the contras do not have “some kind of success” soon, they will likely forfeit American support. The contras’ greatest weakness could be the nature of their great-power patron. It could be that the U.S. does not have the patience to support the incremental struggle that is guerrilla war. And the contras certainly cannot win without outside support. Very few guerrilla armies do. Not even the Viet Cong did.

Which makes the “they can’t win” refrain somewhat ironic. It comes most often from precisely those people in Congress who are constantly fighting to cut aid to the contras, reducing their supplies to the barest minimum, or trying to eliminate assistance altogether. Having disarmed the resistance, they then assert that it cannot win, and then cite the inability to win as a reason for disarming it. A neat circle.

But what of international morality? Even if it is strategically important for the U.S. to prevent a Communist state in Central America, do not American values prevent us from overthrowing another government? In principle, no. It depends on the case. The 1983 overthrow of the thug government of Grenada, for example, surely qualified as one of the more moral exercises of American foreign policy.

The question of contra support, however, poses a different problem. It asks / whether the U.S. has the right to support a 15,000-man peasant army that wants to overthrow its own government. That army believes that its country has been taken over by Leninists who have shut down the opposition, destroyed a free press, repressed the church and run a secret police “advised” by Cubans and East Germans. As the President of Costa Rica put it, the “Nicaraguan people . . . have fought so hard to get rid of one tyrant, one dictator, and seven years later they have nine.”

Guerrilla war is always morally problematic, and it is therefore important for the U.S. to ensure that its allies conduct the war as humanely as any guerrilla war can be conducted. But is it wrong to support a resistance seeking to overthrow the rule of the comandantes? Americans value freedom in their own country. They would not tolerate the political conditions that Nicaraguans must suffer. There is no hope that Nicaraguans will enjoy anything near the liberty that Americans enjoy (and that the Nicaraguans were promised by the Sandinistas) unless their new tyranny is removed. How, then, does it serve American values to cut off aid to those trying to do the removing?

But then these arguments are familiar, too familiar. They have been debated in Congress and elsewhere with seasonal regularity. That is precisely the point, however. It is these familiar arguments that lie at the heart of the decision about whether the U.S. ought to support the contras. Not “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” The failings, even the illegalities, of a President alter neither American strategic interests nor the morality (or immorality) of supporting anti-Communist rebels. Let the debate begin, again. And may it be decided on its merits.