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Administration officials--indeed, most Americans--object with good reason to the way the Sandinistas are repressing their citizens and betraying earlier promises of pluralism and democracy. Of course, official American outrage over the abuse of human and civil rights in Nicaragua would have more force, both within the U.S. and in the international arena, if Washington had not for so many decades countenanced a dictator in Managua as long as he was, in Franklin Roosevelt's famous description of Anastasio Somoza, "our son of a bitch."
The U.S.'s principal objection is to the Sandinistas' close ties with the Soviet Union and the threat they pose directly to neighboring states and indirectly to the U.S. itself. The internal and external policies of the Sandinistas are intimately linked. They are allying themselves with the Soviet Union for the simple reason that they are bent on remaking Nicaraguan society in the Soviet image. Daniel Ortega makes no bones about what he and his compañeros hope to accomplish--and with whose help. Nor are American conservatives the only ones whom the Sandinistas have dismayed and provoked to militant resistance. The junta's relentless, often brutal consolidation of power and erection of a police state have driven some of their original confreres first into the opposition and now into the contra leadership. Similarly, the Sandinistas have no one but themselves to blame for alienating formerly sympathetic American specialists and European social democrats.
Until now, the Reagan Administration has been bent on bringing the Sandinistas to heel--making them cry "uncle," as Reagan put it--in both their internal and external behavior, although the Administration has been disingenuous and inconsistent in what it has said publicly. The President and his aides used to justify the contras as a way of interdicting arms that the Sandinistas were sending to the Salvadoran leftist guerrillas. More recently, Washington has explained the contra campaign as a means to achieve internal political reform: through the pressure of the contras, the U.S. will force the Sandinistas to the negotiating table; then, continued pressure will induce them to make concessions to the democratic opposition and accede to elections in which the opposition will win and the Sandinistas will lose (unlike the elections in November 1984, which were structured in such a way that the opposition dropped out of the running).
The problem with that scenario is that for all the reasons Shultz considers the Sandinistas unacceptable--i.e., their despotic philosophy and methods--they will not negotiate away their hold on power. Shultz knows that. So did his predecessor, Alexander Haig, who spoke in 1981 about dealing with the Soviet-Cuban threat in the hemisphere "at the source." All along, the Administration's real objective has been quite simply to throw the bums out.
If $500 million or a cool billion, never mind the paltry $100 million that the Administration is asking for, would achieve that end, it would be money well spent. But few experts think the contras can either defeat the Sandinistas militarily or force them into negotiations where they can be defeated politically.