Editorials
commonweal SHOULD WE GO TO WAR WITH NICARAGUA? NEVER MIND that for several years we have been at war with Nicaragua. This fact has been conveniently obscured, if by no means hidden, by the...
...Not surprisingly, the Sandinistas are loath to agree...
...A lengthy, two-part analysis in the New York Times (June 4-5) reports that the possibility of direct U.S...
...Its leaders, insofar as they have a guiding philosophy, appear captives of an outlook that scorns "bourgeois" liberties and has a worldwide track record of economic failure...
...When the Institute issued its report for 1960-1970, voluntary efforts to improve equal opportunity for minorities, even when accompanied by technical assistance, were shown to be ineffective...
...But the record shows that, White House claims to the contrary, the U.S...
...The argument then becomes that this nation of less than three million people is a latent danger — a potential Soviet base threatening Gulf of Mexico supply lines to Europe — as well as a base of subversion and a destabilizing factor in 21 June 1985: 355 Central America...
...As Mr...
...But no doubt the appeal to democracy has a real moral force within the administration and to liberals and centrists as well...
...This progress was all the more impressive since it was achieved despite the harsh economic climate beginning in the mid-1970s...
...and despite the persistent disparity in income between males and females at all levels...
...guns, Central America would have been a paragon of democracy long ago...
...The Sandinistas are undeniably pro-Soviet...
...In construction, graduates from apprenticeships (which virtually excluded minorities before affirmative action) rose for all minority groups: from 1.4 percent to 9.5 percent for blacks in nine years...
...One survey reported by the Institute includes contractors among the fans who find numerical goals to be "an essential management tool.'' Pardon us, Mr...
...Talk of interdicting arms faded...
...The next issue will be dated My 12...
...The latent danger will be there as long as the Sandinistas are...
...Absent the complicating factor of a U.S.sponsored insurgency, drawing these lines — and enforcing them — is not an insurmountable problem...
...Too often the medicine seems worse than the disease...
...however much U.S...
...But objections to a war for democracy in Nicaragua do not end with inevitably ambiguous conclusions about the ultimate drift of the Sandinistas...
...affirmative action appears to be working...
...In just six years federal government contractors covered by affirmative action requirements surpassed noncontractors in proportions of minorities employed in five of nine categories...
...Certainly, evocations of "freedom fighters" play better with the public than calculations of security, especially since the latter appear far-fetched to many Americans...
...When Congress first balked at a new round of contra funding, Secretary of State Shultz promptly hinted that the administration might have to commit U.S...
...It is a large step, however, from backing democracy to funding the contras or planning a U.S...
...Oddly, his behavior concerns reversing more Commonweal: 356 than the legality of quotas...
...Duke Power Company, discrimination was broadened beyond "intent to discriminate" to include an analysis of actual employment practices, so-called "built-in headwinds" that blew against whole minority groups...
...Does such a latent danger justify U.S...
...Reynolds has stirred up relatively tranquil waters and picked a fight (in Indiana) by urging fifty-six cities, counties, and states to abolish their legal consent decrees establishing numerical goals for hiring...
...The rationale for backing our proxies today will be the rationale for sending U.S...
...Further data topple the old argument that affirmative action just doesn't work...
...In the face of all such factors, the Institute concludes that' 'at the end of the decade both minorities and women had greater employment in higher-paid jobs, where they had traditionally been underrepresented, than at the beginning...
...A good start," they surmise...
...has never tried to negotiate a reasonable modus vivendi in a straightforward and consistent fashion...
...K Somoza henchmen abundantly disqualify them as standard bearers of democracy...
...This is not the place for a full-scale appraisal of the Sandinista regime...
...In short, the administration is now putting the proposition bluntly to Congress and to the American people: preferably by proxy but if need be by U.S...
...measures — it poses no genuine threat to American security...
...despite the dramatic increase in female heads of households...
...Reynolds has found by brushing against police and fire department employers, the results of affirmative action programs attract supporters...
...War in Central America is not the necessary, not even the plausible, means to assuring security and democracy in the hemisphere...
...justice department's assistant attorney general for civil rights, is particularly troublesome...
...It is a case altogether too subtle — and altogether too trusting of the forces shaping American policy...
...In one case, covering ninety-one companies who volunteered to hire minorities, the gains' 'remained stubbornly small": average black employment rose only one-tenth of a percent from (5.0 in 1961 to 5.1 in 1963...
...policy has cemented this orientation, it was evidently their own choice from the start...
...intervention...
...Enforcement would best be accomplished by regional or international authority...
...policy toward Nicaragua is scandalously unserious, as though war were only political campaigning carried on by other means...
...The outlines of such an agreement have been clear for some time...
...A more subtle case for supporting the contras tacitly grants this point but pleads strengthening them only in order to force the Sandinistas into negotiating a greater degree of political openness...
...forces tomorrow...
...Nicaragua, pace the president, is not "a totalitarian dungeon...
...A rush of adrenalin came when, in a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, Griggsv...
...Does that justify war...
...despite the rising rate of unemployment and its disproportionate impact on young black males...
...What the administration is not saying — at least not clearly — is why...
...In an extraordinary display of muddle-headedness, it seems to be replying, "Why not...
...it violates the Reagan administration's favorite dictum: big government off the backs of local government...
...And Congress...
...21 June 1985: 357...
...That thousands of disaffected campesinos and a number of honorable democratic politicians have felt compelled to join with such dubious leadership reveals the extent of Sandinista failure...
...troops to combat in the region...
...One would think that if there were reasons to justify the bloodshed and destruction of war these would be apparent whether or not the head of Nicaragua's government, like the head of Italy's government or the head of India's government, openly consulted with the Kremlin...
...The first component is security...
...The men who control the guns in the anti-Sandinista insurgency are men whose past careers as In keeping with Commonweal^ asuai summer:jtelH&£ie^ only one issue will be published each month during June, July, and August...
...For a tradition in which war can only be a last resort, justified by stringent criteria, current developments demand an unmistakable protest...
...Nor does the charade about' 'humanitarian'' aid to the contras provide any excuse for not looking at those reasons...
...If democracy could spring from the barrels of U.S...
...These forces have favored right-wing "authoritarians" whenever public opinion did not protest...
...Washington has repeatedly shifted or upped its demands, finally circling around to the insistence that the Sandinistas alter their internal regime and surrender their decisive power...
...According to the report, the picture is brighter now than it was...
...But at the outside it could revert to the U.S., whose forces — at an unknown cost to Honduran political development — are already thoroughly implanted in the region...
...Part of the tangled debate centers on how much of this moderation has survived because of American pressure and how much despite it...
...They require guarantees for Nicaragua's neighbors...
...Yet five years into Sandinista rule, independent centers of power, undisguised manifestations of political opposition, checks on human rights abuses, and even rudiments of parliamentary election and debate remain more real in Nicaragua than in numerous other third-world regimes, including some with close U.S...
...ties...
...Reynolds, while we bother you with the facts...
...military intervention in Nicaragua' 'has become a matter of open discussion" in government circles and the view that such intervention would be relatively easy militarily, if not politically, "seems to have gained wide acceptance within the administration...
...invasion...
...They may limit support to fellow revolutionaries...
...No job discrimination for graduates could be documented...
...But there are no reasonable grounds for belief that a contra military victory would initiate anything but another round of dictatorship, bloodbath, and prolonged insurgency...
...War is evidently a matter of some casualness, to be determined by episodes of the weightiness of President Ortega's ' 'embarrassing'' visit to Moscow...
...and even today are sabotaging the one arguable opening toward a balance between hard-line left and death-squad right that has emerged in Duarte's El Salvador...
...The creeping pace of voluntarism was clearly insufficient...
...Nicaragua's leaders have no doubt created numerous obstacles to reaching such an understanding...
...This fact has been conveniently obscured, if by no means hidden, by the denials oozed from the White House while a plan to train a 500-man guerrilla force for interdicting weapons going from Nicaragua to El Salvador swiftly blossomed into the care and feeding of a full-fledged contra army 15,000-strong...
...And it should...
...But swollen as their military capacity is — both as a consequence of their own revolutionary vision and as a realistic response to U.S...
...Once Congress stopped playing along — prodded by embarrassments like the mining of Nicaraguan harbors and the revelation of a CIA-sponsored lesson book in assassination and terrorism — the administration increasingly shed its own obfuscations and uncertainties...
...There is more...
...consistently reject negotiated compromises...
...The conclusion to be drawn from the potential threat of a pro-Soviet Nicaragua is that Washington should negotiate a modus vivendi...
...Things have changed...
...They involve bans on certain kinds of weaponry as well as Soviet ports...
...Reynolds's rebuffs come smack in the midst of documented gains for minorities according to "A Decade of New Opportunity," a report by the Potomac Institute, an independent research body...
...troops, we should go to war with Sandinista-led Nicaragua...
...That rationale has two main components, emphasized differently by various administration officials and supporters, and sometimes juggled quickly enough to impress the public and hamper scrutiny...
...For many years, however, a less complex argument has been bandied about: not only were the means employed by affirmative action controversial and uncomfortable, but tangible results were negligible, or not worth the expenditures and psychological torment...
...AFFIRMATIVE FACTS One need only be able to feel the national pulse to know that affirmative action and the problems it seeks to correct are deeply disturbing...
...increased...
...Now, the Potomac Institute concludes that from the 19701980 data change has been "significant" and much of it "due to affirmative action...
...The second component of the rationale for war is democracy...
...The principle of non-intervention in international affairs may not be absolute, but to amend it to justify military measures against all sorts of latent dangers is to grant powerful states the privilege of exercising vetos over the makeup of any government within their reach...
...While there is virtually universal agreement on the underlying goal — extending equal job opportunity to all Americans — there are understandable degrees of hesitation about a policy that apportions jobs to people on the basis of numbers or classifies individuals on the basis of race and gender...
...The debate about U.S...
...talk of "freedom fighters" and making the Sandinistas cry "Uncle...
...Most important, Mr...
...The present debate provoked by William Bradford Reynolds, the U.S...
...Nor is it, pace some of its supporters, the last, best hope of the poor and oppressed...
...Appropriate changes in personnel practices appear to have been made, at least among the larger employers of the nation...
Vol. 112 • June 1985 • No. 12
