Word: leiken
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...Since then, Leiken has assessed the Sandinista issue in other articles, including two pieces in the New York Review of Books. After two trips this year to Nicaragua, the most recent with Democratic Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, he has changed his assessment of the contras. He argues that while the rebels were initially a small mercenary force made up of supporters of ousted Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, they have, as a result of widespread disenchantment with the Sandinistas, grown into a diverse army of 20,000 that is now a popularly based vanguard for a widespread and growing rebellion...
...Leiken says his conversion was not of the light-blinding sort experienced by St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Rather, he claims, it was based on numerous trips to Nicaragua, during which the true nature of the Sandinista regime gradually became apparent even as his study of the contras convinced him of their potential. The changes in the Nicaraguan situation, he feels, have not been adequately reported by the U.S. and international press...
...condemnations of the contra leadership do not please White House officials, his calls for "military pressure" to force the Sandinistas to the bargaining table do. Thus Leiken has been accused of being a mouthpiece for the Reagan Administration. Yet he has condemned Reagan's failure to forge a bipartisan consensus. "I think the Administration has chosen to divide the country rather than unite it by using inflated, hyperbolic rhetoric," he says. "The struggle within the elite in the U.S. has taken precedence over what's going on in Nicaragua...
...charge that he is a turncoat particularly rankles Leiken, who still considers himself a member of the left. His credentials are impeccable. In the . 1960s he joined the ban-the-Bomb movement and agitated against the Viet Nam War. In 1975, briefly interrupting an eight-year period of work and study in Mexico, he weighed in with the pro-busing factions in Boston. "No one is going to force me out of the left," Leiken vows. "They may call me a defector and an impostor, but they're not going to force me to change the things that I believe...
Many liberal scholars and journalists have come down hard on their former ally. Alexander Cockburn has charged in the Nation that Leiken's writings are packed with "calumnies and falsehoods." Kevin Kelley of the Guardian, a small radical newspaper in New York, fumed in an article that "Leiken has clearly perfected a political formula that appeals to neoliberal publications." Leiken has been called a press agent for various contra leaders, and his willingness to testify before congressional committees has brought charges of opportunism. Even analysts who respect Leiken's knowledge of Nicaragua are disturbed by his strong advocacy posture. Says...