Essay: Should the U.S. Support the Contras?

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Round 6, is it? President Reagan wants $105 million from Congress for next year's aid for the Nicaraguan contras. Congressionial Democrats are moving now to block $40 million of this year's aid. We revisit the debate that will not die: Should the U.S. support the Nicaraguan resistance?

Congress is hardly the most finely honed instrument for making decisions of this kind. On the question of contra aid, Congress has returned answers, consecutively, of yes, yes, no, a bit, and -- last year -- yes again. (It was during the two years of "no" and "a bit" -- 1984 through 1986, when Congress first banned all aid, then only military aid -- that Colonel North sought to circumvent Congress by funneling aid from other sources, including the Iran arms sale.) Lyndon Johnson once reminded critics that he was the only President we had. This is the only Congress we have. And by 1986 it did appear as if Congress had crossed a divide. After lengthy debate, both Houses voted military aid to the contras.

The Iran-contra affair shouldn't change all that, but it probably will. Less than three hours after Attorney General Meese had announced the discovery of the diversion of Iran arms funds to the contras, Senator David Durenburger of Minnesota, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared, "It's going to be a cold day in Washington, D.C., before any more money goes to Nicaragua."

This even before it was known whether or not the contra forces had seen any of the diverted money. This even before it was known whether the contras were even aware that funds were being illegally diverted for their benefit. What was known for more than a year was that the contras were the beneficiaries of some kind of supply operation run with a wink and a nod from the Administration. It was assumed that this was funded by "private" sources and possibly from money from third-party governments. And until Meese revealed that some money had also been skimmed from the Iran arms sales, this assumption aroused very little protest from Congress. Are the contras to be punished because they did not suspect an Iranian connection, something that, throughout November, no one in Congress (or in the press, for that matter) suspected?

But the gathering sentiment to reverse aid derives less from a desire to punish the contras than from a desire to punish the Administration. Of course, the Administration deserves to be punished. For the negligence of those who were ignorant or willed themselves into ignorance over the Iran arms affair. And for the lawlessness of those who actually carried out an operation designed to contravene congressional will.

But how to punish? Wounding a President by reversing his most cherished foreign policy goal is an understandable political instinct. But if it wounds the country, it is a bad one. Congress had come to the view that contra aid was in the national interest. It remains so. Abandoning that interest to get to a President is a high price to pay for sweet revenge.

The case for (and indeed, the case against) the contras remains utterly unchanged by the North affair. Now as before, the case for the contras rests on two pillars. One strategic and the other ideological -- moral, if you will.