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Both sides in the Great Contra Debate are using as a scare tactic the possibility that the U.S. might have to intervene directly in Nicaragua. Opponents of the Administration have warned for years that the contras are the forerunners of American troops. Now, just in the past few weeks, Reagan, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan have turned the argument around, invoking the specter of G.I.s in the jungle as something that no one wants to see but that might be required down the road if the Congress defies the President now. Sooner or later, they say, someone has to do to the Sandinistas what they did to the Somocistas--drive them out of Managua--and if the contras can't, the job may fall to the 82nd Airborne.
The Administration is quite right not to rule out the use of American military force in Central America. The U.S. must keep all its enemies guessing in this respect, from the Soviet Union to two-bit muggers in the back alleys of the Third World. But the political wisdom of "threatening" Congress with the prospect of American military intervention was dubious. It invited a chain of tough questions that only put the Administration more on the defensive at a time when it needs to close partisan ranks: What if the Congress goes along with the White House, but the contras still fail? What if the Sandinistas will yield to their enemies neither at the bargaining table nor on the battlefield? Might the U.S. face an unhappy choice: accepting defeat and humiliation by proxy, or having to come to the rescue of its proxies with its own troops? Then the U.S. could find itself bogged down in a messy war and torn apart in an even messier domestic debate.
Somewhere between the Administration's ill-disguised desire to back the contras as a means of over throwing the Sandinistas and the Congress's temptation to consign them to a quick defeat by pulling the plug on U.S. support, there are at least two other courses of action. One is for the U.S. to support the contras indefinitely as a way of distracting and bleeding the Sandinistas. Even if the contras cannot win militarily, perhaps they could provide insurance that the regime would be too busy at home to make mischief abroad.
There are strong arguments for that idea, but also some serious problems. For one, the contras cannot be expected to fight indefinitely without realistic hope of victory. They and their country are different in key ways from the mujahedin in Afghanistan, who are fighting to expel 100,000 alien infidels, and Jonas Savimbi's forces in Angola, who, unlike the contras, control the territory from which they operate.
Even if the contras were willing to persist in a guerrilla war, there is doubt that U.S. opinion would persist in backing them. The current wrangle over aid to the contras is all too typical of what happens when the American political system tries to cope with a controversial foreign entanglement that does not promise clear or early results.