War Is Over, Sandinistas Have Won : Will Sham Keep Up Until the Last Dollar Is Spent in Blood?

No matter what else happens in the unraveling melodrama in Washington, one thing now seems certain: The Sandinistas have won their war against the contras. The fighting will go on for a while, soldiers and civilians will die, schools and granaries and bridges will be destroyed. But if the goal of war is victory, this one is over. It ended on that bleak Tuesday when Ronald Reagan and Edwin Meese walked into a briefing room to relate their squalid tale of the diversion of funds from the Iran arms deal to the contra army. Almost certainly Reagan will not get another dime for his grimy Central American crusade. And on their own the contras cannot win. It’s over.

Analysts here figure that there is enough money in the contra pipeline to sustain the killing for another year; much of that famous $100 million has not yet been spent. The contras can make a few bloody public-relations raids into Nicaragua, they can pose for photographers while swinging from trees near Eglin Air Force Base, they can mount some wonderful press conferences in Miami. But the Democratic Congress will not vote them more money, and the wounded President won’t risk losing everything by sending more secret funds.

“What Reagan must do now,” a middle-level Mexican diplomat said the other day after scanning the Washington stories on the front pages of the Mexican newspapers, “is to get out of the Nicaragua mess with grace.”

This will not be easy. There are an estimated 15,000 contra soldiers camped in the privileged sanctuaries of Honduras. They are essentially wards of the United States. Their leaders range from true democratic idealists to old Somoza killers, but they have at least one trait in common: They can count. The notion that they will continue fighting until the last dollar is spent can only provoke dark laughter. They and the money almost certainly will leave the battlefield together.

Their future is virtually predictable. There will be furtive visits to the Cayman Islands, the leaders will peddle their anti-communist martyrdom on grants from right-wing foundations, Miami will vibrate with defiant oratory. And, back in the hills of Nicaragua and Honduras, a few lost platoons will fight on, reduced to a form of banditry, and the rest will drift back home or enter the permanent loneliness of exile. Only friends and relatives will mourn the dead. Nobody in Washington will even learn their names.

The essential question here now is whether Washington will learn any lessons from the disaster. Reagan committed a cardinal sin: He allowed zealots to make policy, men whose self-righteous passions allowed them to break the law. Foreign policy should always be in the hands of men and women who are cool, intelligent, aware of the lessons of history, not imprisoned by its moth-eaten slogans. But from the beginning Reagan’s Nicaragua policy was a throwback, a brutally nostalgic combination of 1950s anti-communism and 1920s gunboat diplomacy.

Worse, the policy was informed by an unstated Anglo-Saxon contempt for the Catholic, Spanish-speaking, underdeveloped south. The Reagan people paid lip service to the efforts of the Contadora Group (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama) to work out a regional settlement, but did everything possible to wreck the process. After all, what did these backward Latins know about playing hardball in world affairs?

And so, insisting that Central America was an East-West battleground, the hard men in Washington sneered at such local concepts as “national sovereignty” (mushy liberal or nationalistic rhetoric), turned to the gun, corrupted the governments of Honduras and Costa Rica, and with a “wink and a nod” broke the laws of the United States.

If there was one enduring lesson of Vietnam and Watergate, it was this: Illegal or immoral policies end up contaminating even the best and the brightest. The Reagan people did not learn it. Oliver North seems to think that the essential lesson was to destroy the evidence.

Today the Contadora Group resembles one of downtown Mexico City’s buildings damaged in the 1985 earthquake. The basic structure is intact; it needs only the will, the care and the grace of thoughtful men and women to return it to full usefulness and life. Contadora is held together now almost single-handedly by Mexico’s intelligent and flexible foreign secretary, Bernardo Sepulveda.

The Reagan people should close down the contra training camps, turn over the peace process to Contadora, and abide by the results. These could involve the removal of all foreign military, including Cubans and Americans, from the region; amnesty for all guerrilla fighters; the neutralizing of Nicaragua on the Austrian model (even Josef Stalin kept that agreement) and the creation of a Central American Marshall Plan to repair the wreckage of war.

All these things should be done as quickly as possible for one simple reason: The contra war is over, and nobody else should die.