Reagan' s Contrary Campaign

...What we did was to persuade our crooked old client that his well of friendship in this country was drying up, and that the sight on the evening news of blood running in the streets of Manila, far from replenishing it, might endanger Imelda's skin...

...Is the world wrong...

...Like other Vice Presidents, the incumbent keeps demonstrating the enthusiasm with which he can kiss whoever and whatever requires kissing, and with his mouth open, too...

...When Reagan calls himself a contra he invites a defamation suit on behalf of the good name of the Presidency...

...What we can lose is any remaining belief by Latin Americans and our democratic friends in the rest of the world that our interests do indeed reside with democracies, albeit of an independent sort, rather than with client states...

...When the Most Foul Is Natural Politicians naturally resort to their worst tactics to support their weakest cases...

...The good news is that the man has missed his time...

...The China Lobby was dissolved some years ago and the soft-on-Communism label that once sent shivers through Washington has lost its potency...

...The Sandinistas can be given notice, perhaps through their patrons in Moscow, that any threat to their neighbors would invite retaliation—but as long as the con-tras use Honduran bases for operations in Nicaragua, it is difficult to be outraged when, now and then, the Sandinistas move across that porous border...

...What happened, in fact, was that despots who had benefited from United States attentions for many years found themselves in increasingly untenable positions, through no doing of ours, and we assisted them in escaping with their families, retainers and much of their wealth...

...Reagan's maunderings about "losing Central America" cannot fail to remind the nation of those warnings three decades ago about us "losing China...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Reagans Contrary Campaign The Reagan Administration has succeeded in turning its campaign to provide military aid for the Nicaraguan contras into a political and intellectual slum...

...Does it strain the imagination to see George Bush in such a role...

...This much must be said for Buchanan—he may be nasty but he is not original, either with his particular piece of foulness or in the role he has been assigned in the Reagan White House...

...These were people, remember, whom our officials were wont to fawn over in not-so-distant times...

...That was okay diplomacy, yet something less than, say, the Camp David accords—and what, anyhow, does it have to do with Nicaragua...

...No sooner did the abominable Marcos, along with his minions and his nation's millions, arrive in Hawaii, than the Administration was taking credit for a grand diplomatic coup...

...And once having pumped in $100 million, how much more would be required to protect our investment...

...That is deplorable...

...There is no point calling him a McCar-thyite, since he takes that as a compliment...

...Still, it's better than sticking with that great favorite of free-market economists until he is brought down by the equivalent of the Sandinistas, and then shipping arms to his former commanders in exile to restore their version of freedom to their country...

...The big lesson of Haiti and the Philippines is that it takes the people of such benighted lands to get rid of their dictators...

...Thanks Pat...

...The only surprise in that talk was his failure to charge the Sandinistas with causing AIDS...

...The Congress has yet to see convincing evidence of all those arms the State and Defense Departments claim are being shipped from Nicaragua to El Salvador...

...Who but Ronald Reagan could have managed that...

...We can thank the Filipinos and the Sandinistas for Washington's belated criticism of Augusto Pinochet's inhuman rights record...

...The truth is simple and unedifying: What gets the juices running on the Right in this country is the chance to bloody some Communists, not the chance to nurture democracy...

...The Administration is not asking for money to ease the departure of Daniel Ortega Saavedra and his comrade co-mandantes by spiriting them to pleasant accommodations in Hawaii or on the French Riviera...

...As for our dubbing as "freedom fighters," or as "the democratic resistance,' peasants led by characters who displayed such great fondness for freedom in their years of guarding Somoza, that is mor-tifyingly Orwellian...

...One can already hear Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger assuring talk show audiences that he can discern light at the end of the Central American tunnel—just give him another couple of hundred million and a handful of American advisers...

...The campaign to prove that the Sandinistas pose a mortal threat to all of Latin America and to our own vitals, as the President charged in his parodic television talk a few days before the House voted against military aid, has been wondrously unpersuasive...

...In attempting to use Ferdinand Marcos' departure from the Philippines as a springboard for indirect intervention in Nicaragua, it has made a hash of history, reality and logic...

...The Nicaraguan people, better acquainted with them than the White House publicists, have given the contras little support of the sort the anti-Somoza rebels enjoyed...

...it is not, as things go on this globe, catastrophic...

...To find a precedent for this type of endeavor one must go back to the Bay of Pigs...

...The President has spent a lot of his own currency in his unpleasant campaign, however, and he has not gotten the return he sought...

...The Administration contends that the Philippine ease, like that of the execrable Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti, was an exemplary instance of American power being placed at the service of democratic forces in the Third World...

...Whatever we can do to clean up the contras might, at the least, help them find support in their own country and improve our own credibility in a part of the world where our record is not uplifting...

...One way or another, we are bound to invest in the contras...

...It wants to mount a rebellion against them, using many of So-moza's former National Guardsmen to bear the banner of freedom—hardly the equivalent of our actions in the Philippines or in Haiti...

...Indeed, the Carter Administration was criticized by some of those who now present themselves as opponents of despotism for allowing Anastasio Somoza Debayle to go down...

...Economic and diplomatic pressure on regimes like the ones in Nicaragua and in Chile are appropriate...

...We should have been much warmer to Benigno Aquino before he was gunned down...

...If we want to spend money to serve our values in Central America, the democratic forces in countries like El Salvador and Costa Rica, which find themselves under pressure from both Left and Right, can use it...

...Isitpossi-ble that Central America is not ours to lose...

...The much-advertised new, improved White House policy of getting tough with the sort of dictators Jeane Kirkpatrick used to invent apologies for is of course welcome—but let's wait and see whether it turns out to be more than the hour's slogan designed to make the guns-to-the-contras pill slide down like butter...

...We have so arranged matters that the world believes Reagan would rather fight than talk...

...Alas, Nicaragua is afflicted with a Marxist regime which has about as much use for the amenities of democracy as Somoza had...

...thecost, forNicaraguans, of our sending in our new-style mercenaries, would be high...

...Nicaragua is not Grenada or a missile site in Libya...

...In charging opponents of its proposed adventure with being soft on Communism—well, perhaps only inadvertently or unconsciously soft—it has played to the worst emotions of the mob and replayed one of the sourest tunes of the 1950s...

...An achievement it was, but of a certain quality and order...

...Marcos was the kind of pro-American who could count on having a Vice President dispatched to him periodically, bearing medals...

...Buchanan has not done his contras any good, but he appears to have embarrassed the White House into making noises about negotiation with the Sandinistas and uttering public criticism of Right-wing dictators...

...Can the people of South Korea and South Africa now count on the Reagan Administration to help them resist repression...

...So up pops the Administration's bully boy, Patrick Buchanan, with the charge that those who are disinclined to make an open-ended commitment to the contras are soft on Communism...

...We must hope that the peoples of the Philippines and Haiti have as short and selective memories of our contribution to their cruel histories as our President—whose acquaintance with history seems to be derived mainly from the movies or his own misty imagination—and that they keep in mind what we did to rid them of their oppressors at the final hour rather than what we did to keep thugs in power and comfort for so many years...

...Not until the other day did Reagan's supporters take notice of the repression in nearby Chile, and it has yet to show much indignation over the goings on in Guatemala, a land where our intervention against a Marxist produced a succession of brutal regimes...

...Here is a country where a longtime client of the United States was beaten in battle, without direct aid from Washington for the rebels...

...Every President needs his Buchanan...

...Sure we should help them...

...If the Right were reliable prophets regarding United States security, Castro would by now have marched up to Alaska, the Russians would be in charge of Western Europe and the Chinese would be presiding in Tokyo...

...A Different Case Nicaragua is another story...

...That may mean military aid, and it certainly means economic aid, controlled to succor the poor, not to fill numbered bank accounts in Switzerland...

...the Sandinistas appear to have stopped that provocation in 1981...

...The best that can be said for our role in the toppling of Somoza is that we didn't send the failing strongman even more military equipment of the sort the Administration now wants to send to troops led in part by his former retainers...

...Another thing the Administration might do is make a serious effort at negotiations in behalf of the rights of those inside Nicaragua who oppose the Sandinistas...

...Would that our record was so clean...

...Instead, he has succeeded in rallying serious resistance and suspicion in Congress and the nation toward an ill-justified adventure...