Word: guerrillas
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Short of U.S. military intervention, the only alternative to supporting a guerrilla action is to bolster the diplomatic efforts that were part of the contra policy. Moderates in Congress claim the Administration has done little to advance the negotiations. Democratic Congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, a past supporter of contra aid, voted for the moratorium because of what he described as "ineptitude" on the diplomatic front. "There has been a complete undermining" of the negotiating process, he says. "What they've done is harden people like me who could have been friendly...
...held aloft, "but it doesn't matter, because you're going to a better place anyway!" To many of his eager listeners in a San Salvador stadium, the distant hope of heaven may have been at least momentarily alluring, beset as their nation has been by a seven-year guerrilla war and a moribund economy. When the preacher later assured them that "terrible times are coming," the applause of approving believers reached a thunderous peak...
...Other foreign policy problems are crowding in, and will be exacerbated by the fallout from the Tower commission report. The most immediate and, for Reagan, disastrous effect may be the collapse of the contra campaign. The contras are central to the so-called Reagan doctrine of helping rebels wage guerrilla war against Marxist governments in widely scattered areas of the globe: Afghanistan, Angola, Kampuchea. But the contras cannot carry on their rebellion without continued U.S. assistance. The Tower report shows the extent to which North, Poindexter and the CIA went, in circumventing the law, to slip arms to them during...
...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...
...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...