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Looking Beyond the Vote for Contra Aid
| Article
# : |
11380 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
3,055 Words |
| Author
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Sir Alfred Sherman
Sir Alfred Sherman is a policy adviser to Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and has written widely on global strategic
and domestic policy. |
So long as the battle in Congress for aid to the Nicaraguan Contras was proceeding, supporters of the Reagan administration's Central American policies in general kept to themselves any misgivings regarding the soundness or effectiveness of the Contras and policies based on them. It was practical politics to support their own side in a confrontation with politicians and media men who were either supportive of communist inroads into the Western Hemisphere or preferred to close their eyes to them. Awkward questions were best left until afterward, a self-denying ordinance made easier by the nature of the opposition; to find oneself somehow on the same side as Sen. Edward Kennedy could not possibly be right.
Now that this particular obstacle has been surmounted-albeit by a wafer-thin majority and at the price of still further strengthening the Soviet drive into southern Africa-it is time to abandon reticence and to ask where we go from here. A strategy is needed. What can President Reagan and the American people expect for their $67 million? The overthrow of the communist government in Nicaragua and expulsion of its Cuban, East German, Bulgarian, and other mentors? Or failing that, can the Contras hope to exert sufficient military and political pressure inside Nicaragua to weaken effective aid to the Salvadoran insurgents to a point where President Jose Napoleon Duarte can stabilize the country? Or are there as yet unarticulated alternative outcomes: an undefined compromise of sorts, some tertium quid?
Let us list the assumptions. 'Assumption A' is that the Contras, fortified by their millions and by bolder U.S. aid and involvement, will mount an offensive, defeat the Sandinista army, and establish an alternative government in Managua.
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