1999 (22 page)

While we must accept the fact that a great power does not always win, we must understand that if we take no risks we will never win. Victories require risks. At the same time, we must recognize that there are no permanent victories in the American–Soviet struggle. If they lose a battle, communists do not quit, but fall back to regroup for another day. Too often, after a defeat, Americans assume that the game is over, when in reality it has just moved into a different phase.

An ebb follows every tide in history. In the 1970s, the Soviets rode a rising tide in the Third World. But once in power, communists have failed to generate the genuine popular appeal necessary if the tide is to continue to rise. Yet, if the United States fails to support anticommunist revolutionaries with the Reagan Doctrine, this red tide will never ebb. If we accept all Soviet victories as permanent and irreversible, we will make communism the wave of the future.

We should apply these foreign-policy doctrines to current conflicts in Central America, Southwest Asia, southern Africa, and Southeast Asia.

In Central America, while vital U.S. interests are not directly at stake in the conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador, these struggles do involve the critical American interests of preventing the Soviet Union from securing a beachhead in the region. That would put the Kremlin a few shorts steps away from threatening the Panama Canal and Mexico. These vital interests might not be immediately at risk in the Central American crisis, but they are ultimately at risk.

In Nicaragua, our interests are not a matter of whether the government in Managua respects human rights and says nice things about the United States. A dictatorship, even a totalitarian one, does not threaten American interests per se, and the anti-American rhetoric of a country like Mexico is annoying but harmless. Our interests were engaged only when Nicaragua forged links with the Soviet bloc and became a base for Soviet expansionism in Central
America. The problem is not the fact that the Sandinista government is communist but that the communist government of Nicaragua is inherently expansionist.

There are those on the left who dispute the fact that Nicaragua is a threat to its neighbors. They have to concede that the Sandinistas have built up the largest military force in the history of Central America. But they argue that it was created solely for the defensive purpose of fighting the U.S.-supported anticommunist contras. They are doubly wrong. They ignore the fact that the Nicaraguan buildup
predated
the rise of the contras, and they miss the major point that the real threat to Central America from Nicaragua is not an overt invasion with conventional forces but covert subversion with unconventional forces.

Nicaraguan communist leaders would not dispute this fact. They freely admit, and even boast, that they seek “a revolution without frontiers” in Central America—a clear admission that they intend to impose communism on neighboring countries. It was cause and effect, not coincidence, that a geometric escalation of the guerrilla threat to El Salvador followed the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. If Nicaragua becomes a safe haven and an arms conduit for communist revolutionaries, we can look forward to decades of messy counterinsurgency warfare in the region. Moscow will be able to conquer Central America at its leisure.

If the United States fails to act against this threat now, it will face a far graver threat later. Those who counsel a policy of containment against Nicaragua urge, in effect, that we wait until our security problems become acute before we act. That approach could undermine the entire American position in the world. Containment works only against overt attack. It does not work against subversion. If Nicaragua succeeds in sparking communist revolutions in other Central American states, our reaction would be to seek to contain them as well. Sooner or later, we will hear the same voices which now call for drawing the line at the Honduran border advocating a policy of containment for a communist Mexico by drawing a line at the Mexican border.

That would be a strategic disaster for the West. The only reason the United States can deploy 350,000 troops in Europe and 40,000 troops in Korea is that it does not have to defend any of its borders.
If the Nicaraguan communists consolidate their power at home and export communism abroad, the United States will have to redeploy its forces, drawing back a substantial portion of our forces in Europe to defend our southern flank. It is significant to note that Managua's military buildup has already forced the United States to deploy two thousand troops on a semipermanent basis in Honduras.

The United States cannot accept a government in Nicaragua that is tied to the Soviet Union and that seeks to subvert neighboring countries. That is exactly what the current regime intends to do. Our goal therefore must be to induce the Sandinistas to change their aggressive policies toward their neighbors.

Many believe that the states of the region should settle their differences through the peace plan of Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias. President Reagan has accepted the plan, but the United States must avoid repeating the failures of the Contadora peace talks. Nicaragua used those negotiations to buy time to build up its military position. For six years, the two sides talked past each other. The Reagan administration and the democratic states of Central America wanted an agreement that called for the Sandinistas to negotiate with the contras about the political future of Nicaragua. The Sandinistas wanted an agreement that required the United States and its friends to cut off assistance to the contras. While well intentioned, the Arias plan risks falling into the same deadlock.

At the other extreme, there are those who argue that the United States should just bite the bullet and intervene with its own forces in Nicaragua. If we invade, there is no doubt that the United States has the power to prevail, and prevail quickly. Nicaragua's army is large and well armed for the Third World. But its ranks are filled mostly with unwilling conscripts who have fought poorly against the contras, and its supply lines to Cuba and the Soviet Union would be severed immediately. Unlike in Grenada, the United States would suffer significant casualties. An intervention would not, however, be another Vietnam. We would win.

Our problems would come not in winning but in deciding what to do once we had won. However effective the contras may turn out to be as a guerrilla force, they are not a government-in-waiting.
If the United States intervenes, it should be ready for a long stay. It took the Allies six years to set up a government in West Germany and for the United States to do so in Japan. It would take longer in Nicaragua.

Since negotiations alone cannot reach a genuine solution and since a long-term U.S. military involvement is an unsatisfactory option, the only way to stop Sandinista aggression is to couple peace talks with renewed support for the anticommunist contras. Nicaragua's communist leaders are fanatical men with conquest on their agenda. They are bent on bringing down all the fledgling democracies in Central America. We will not win them over with kindness. Unless the United States puts some kind of pressure on the Sandinistas, they will have no reason to change their policy of aggression through subversion.

U.S. aid to the contras has been in the interest of the Nicaraguan people. Some people support the government, but the majority oppose it. Nicaraguans from every sector of society joined the revolution against Somoza in order to establish a democratic government. Instead, they have gotten a tyranny worse than Somoza's. The Sandinistas have trampled on human rights, held fraudulent elections, harassed the church, closed down the press, intimidated the internal opposition with state-supported mobs, and tightened their grip on power with shipments of arms from the Soviet Union. The communist government has stolen the people's dream of democracy and has earned their enmity.

In addition, pressure from the contras lessens the repression by the Sandinistas. When the United States sent almost $300 million in economic aid to Nicaragua in the first year after the revolution, the Sandinistas took their greatest strides in building the foundations of totalitarianism. When that aid ended and American aid to the contra movement commenced, they eased the pace. But when Congress cut off our assistance to the contras, the Sandinistas escalated their repressive efforts to achieve total control over the Nicaraguan people. The most frivolous argument against aid to the contras is the chant “No more Vietnams.” The way to avoid another Vietnam is to aid the contras now, rather than to be faced later with the necessity to send in U.S. forces to eliminate a Soviet base in the Western Hemisphere.

There are those who say that the contras have no chance to win. Whether they are right or wrong depends on the definition of victory. If it means marching on Managua in less than a year, they are right. If it means forcing the Sandinista leadership to negotiate a settlement, they are wrong.

With continued American support, contra forces have the staying power to wage a prolonged guerrilla war of attrition. With over twenty thousand troops in the field, the contras already have a more powerful army than the Sandinistas did when Somoza was toppled. Nicaragua's regular army has about sixty thousand troops and has received modern Soviet equipment, but has not performed well in combat. Even when the contras received no official U.S. military assistance, they were able to blunt the attack of Sandinista forces on contra base camps in Honduras. Government units have failed to stop the contras from infiltrating thousands of troops and tons of arms and ammunition into Nicaragua. The military bottom line is that Managua cannot prevent the contras from undertaking a major guerrilla campaign.

If we give the contras adequate support, the Sandinistas will not be able to count on the Soviet Union to come to the rescue. As the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated twenty-five years ago, Kremlin leaders would never risk a direct confrontation with the United States ten thousand miles away from the Soviet Union. They cannot project their conventional power over such great distances. And despite their increased nuclear capability compared with 1962, they are not going to risk nuclear war with the United States in order to save their clients in Managua. If push comes to shove, they will leave the Nicaraguan government to fend for itself. That fact creates major leverage for the United States.

We need to have a two-track policy. On the one hand, we should give the talks under the Arias plan a reasonable chance to succeed. On the other hand, however, our commitment to these negotiations cannot be open-ended. There must be a deadline.

The terms of the Arias plan call for all countries in Central America to end their civil wars by adopting democratic forms of government in which antigovernment insurgents can participate. Our friends in the region—Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—already comply with those conditions. But Nicaragua
does not. We must ensure that President Arias and the other Central American leaders hold the Sandinistas' feet to the fire on the crucial issue of establishing a genuine democracy in Nicaragua. We should also insist that Nicaragua scale down its enormous armed forces and that its huge shipments of Soviet-bloc weapons be discontinued. For the Soviets alone to discontinue their aid would not be enough. Cuba and the other communist-bloc countries would pick up the slack. If the negotiations fail on these points, we must be prepared to move to the second track: military pressure on Managua.

We must be realistic about the motivations behind the political maneuvering of the Sandinistas. They have one objective in mind: to disband the contras. American political figures who meet with Sandinista leaders and who then prattle about how sincerely the Nicaraguans want peace are unbelievably naive. Daniel Ortega and his sidekicks want peace only if it means a victory of his communist government over his anticommunist opposition.

Unfortunately, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Arias urged that the United States immediately end all aid—military and nonmilitary—to the contras. This would bring a communist peace to Nicaragua—a peace which would mean death for the contras, desolation for the Nicaraguan people, and a new wave of communist aggression through subversion against the free nations of Central America.

Sandinista leaders adopted a shrewd political strategy. They skillfully created the appearance of political progress in Nicaragua in order to induce Congress to cut off funding to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters. As a result, they released about one thousand political prisoners, permitted the church radio station to resume broadcasting, allowed
La Prensa
to reopen, and even entered indirect negotiations with the contras. But the Sandinistas still hold more than four thousand political prisoners, prohibit news programs on the church radio station, and censor the press. Most important, in their indirect talks the Sandinistas are willing to discuss only the terms of surrender for the contras, rather than sitting down to work out the procedures for instituting democratic elections.

To counter this, the Reagan administration should pursue every
available legal means to keep the anticommunist forces alive. This is needed to pressure the Sandinistas in the negotiating process and to prepare for the likely event that the talks fail. Those in Congress who want to kill the cause of democracy in Nicaragua should keep in mind that whenever the legislative branch seizes the executive's authority over foreign affairs they will be held responsible for the consequences. The administration's Wrights-capade put the contras on a slippery slope. If the Sandinistas consolidate their control in Nicaragua, the consequences will include communist insurgencies and heightened instability throughout Central America. And the blood will be on the hands of the Congress.