President Franklin D. Roosevelt kept a man on his staff to read small town newspapers and report the pulse of the people so the White House would not be misled by the Washington, D.C. media. President George Bush should be glad he has his attorney, C. Boyden Gray, to tell him the unpleasant things he doesn’t want to hear.
When CEOs sign agreements with adversaries, they usually consult their lawyers to warn them about what is in the fine print. Unfortunately, the President signed the agreement with the Congress about the Contras without letting his lawyer examine it first, and Gray thinks the President relinquished too much power to Congress.
Gray is probably right but, in support of the agreement, we are told that it is all Bush can get out of Jim Wright’s Congress, so we might as well make the best of it and send the Contras a few sandwiches and bandages to keep body and soul together.
The $27 million in non-lethal aid appropriated last September for the Contra resistance forces expired at the end of March. There are only about 15,000 Contra troops, but American aid feeds about 60,000 people at a cost of about $3 million a month.
President Bush was confronted with the question of what will happen if this terminates. An aid cut-off would deal a terrible blow to the fragile economy of Honduras, where the Contras are now located, by dumping on that little country thousands of nonproductive refugees.
Honduras cannot absorb the economic burden of sustaining these troops and their families. Such an event would probably push Honduras into a closer relationship with the Sandinistas than with us.
Does anyone think that the Contras, who were mostly peasant farmers before they joined the resistance troops, will be willing to return to a Nicaragua controlled by the Sandinistas? There is no reason for them to return and there are plenty of reasons for them to fear retribution from the Sandinistas.
That is exactly what was found by a six-member bipartisan Congressional delegation which made a flying visit last month to Honduras to review U.S. Army training exercises and also to get an update on the status of the Nicaraguan Contras. No Contra expressed a desire to return to Nicaragua as long as the Sandinistas are in power and, if the Sandinistas cannot be deposed by political means, the Contras favor military removal.
Led by Rep. g. V. (Sonny) Montgomery (D-MS), the delegation included Congressmen John Paul Hammerschmidt (R-AR), Bob Stump (R-AZ), Earl Hutto (D-FL), Bob McEwen (R-OH), and Claude Harris (D-AL).
Another option would be for big-hearted United States to open our doors and welcome the Contras as refugees. Our embassy estimates the cost of this plan at $18,000 per person, or $270 million if we accepted only the 15,000 Contras.
With America’s traditional policy of family togetherness, the more likely number of refugees we would have to take would be 100,000 Contras, their families, and Contra sympathizers. This cost would be $2 billion and would surely arouse political opposition in the United States.
President Bush opted for a deal to continue humanitarian aid at roughly present levels in the hope that something might happen to bring about a peaceful political solution, such as Gorbachev stopping aid to the Sandinistas. Soviet military aid to the Sandinistas is now running at more than $500 million a year, and mayn feel that the Sandinistas would fall if this were cut off.
The six Congressmen came away from their meeting with the Contras with a new understanding of the difficulty of reaching a political solution. The Congressmen found the Contras ideologically hardened, with high morale, and some of them stated a willingness to fight till the bitter end.
The Congressmen also found the Contras to be militarily capable even though, since the termination of U.S. military aid, their operational posture has changed from military insurgency to maintaining force structure. About one-third of Contra troops are at all times engaged in guerilla sabotage or intelligence gathering missions.
The Contras expressed a dire need for weapons, ammunition and communications equipment, particularly radios. Their military victories before Congress cut off military aid convinced them that the renewal of military aid from the United States is the bes way to deal with the recalcitrance of the Sandinistas.
The Contras also told the Congressmen that a renewal of military aid is the most expedient way to further U.S. interests in Central America. The Congressmen returned with the impression that the Contra soldiers will not return to Nicaragua unless they are waging a war to establish democracy in their home country or the Sandinistas have been removed by some other method.
Before we pat ourselves on the back about the success of the unusual executive-legislative accord, we should explore the ultimate question. Is our goal freedom for Nicaragua or peace at any price? And if it is the latter, how much are we willing to pay to welcome a flood of refugees to the U.S.A.?
