Word: nicaragua
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Whatever shifts of nuance may be occurring, the Administration is clearly trying to create a framework that links U.S. support for democratic opponents of the recently toppled right-wing regimes in Haiti and the Philippines with its support for contra rebels fighting the left-wing regime in Nicaragua. A House vote on Reagan's $ 100 million aid package for the contras is scheduled for this week (see ESSAY). "Important choices now rest with the Congress," said Reagan last week, "to betray those struggling against tyranny . . . or to join in a bipartisan national endeavor to strengthen both freedom and peace...
...however, declare that the U.S. wholeheartedly backed President José Napoleón Duarte's recent offer to meet with Salvadoran rebels if the Sandinista government in Nicaragua would in turn hold talks with the contras. If that should happen, declared Habib, the Reagan Administration would be prepared to resume bilateral discussions with the Sandinistas. CHINA Chasing Bad Characters...
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...
...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...
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...