Word: contras
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...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...
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...
...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 Tío Sam, hence an even greater incentive to go to work on their rather fragile neighbors...
...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...
Meanwhile, Salvadoran President José Napoleón 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...