Ollie North Returns to Nicaragua

The electoral wave that battered Republicans last week rolled well beyond Ohio and Arizona, traveling as far south as Nicaragua, where voters rejected intense U.S. pressure and elected Daniel Ortega president. This was Ortega's third attempt to regain the office since stepping down in 1990, after a decade in power as the head of the revolutionary Sandinista government. And even as George W. Bush was stumping for his candidates in the heartland, Oliver North was traveling down to Managua to urge Nicaraguans to vote for anyone but Ortega.

The ex-Marine colonel told Nicaraguans that they had "suffered enough from the influence of outsiders" -- a remark meant to criticize Hugo Chávez's support for Ortega but that some, considering North's role in running the covert operation that illegally funded the anti-Sandinista Contras in the 1980s, must have mistaken for a confession. In addition to North, Bush's Ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul Trivelli, threatened that the United States could cut off aid, while congressional Republicans warned that they would pass legislation prohibiting Nicaraguans living in the United States from sending remittances home if Nicaraguans voted the wrong way.

Over the last couple of weeks, with polls predicting that an Ortega win seemed likely, conservative blogs, think tanks, and policy intellectuals whipped themselves up into a near-frenzy at the thought of a Sandinista comeback. The National Review breathlessly warned that a triumphant Ortega would bring the threat of nuclear or biological terrorism to "within walking distance of our undefended border." Over at the Washington Post, the American Enterprise Institute's Roger Noriega predicted that an Ortega victory would push Nicaragua "toward the abyss."

But Ortega is a changed man from the revolutionary who for more than a decade withstood a Washington-backed assault of intense ferocity. He has declared himself a free-trade Christian, and just before the vote joined forces with the Catholic Church to back an anti-abortion law that is more punitive than anything James Dobson's Focus on the Family hopes to pass here in the United States.

The reason for such hysteria cannot be explained by what Ortega may or may not do once in office, but rather by the dissonance his victory creates deep in the recesses of the neocon psyche.

Central America, particularly Nicaragua, played a key role in the formation of the world view of our foreign-policy hawks. As diplomatic historian Andrew Bacevich points out, in "neoconservative lore, 1980 stands out not only as a year of crisis but as the year when the nation decisively turned things around." When considering this turnaround, most casual observers usually point to the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe. Neocons, though, have a complicated relationship to those two events, coming about as they did not through confrontational militarism but negotiation and patience. Just a few years ago, when pressed by the Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee to admit that Bush's Iraq policy was similar to Ronald Reagan's in Europe, Wesley Clark had to remind his interrogator that "Reagan never invaded Eastern Europe." In fact, Reagan, in sharp contrast to his rhetorical escalation of the Cold War and his increase in defense spending, followed a course of restraint in most foreign policy arenas, so much so that by 1986 his conservative base had taken to calling him the Soviet Union's "useful idiot" for negotiating arms reductions with Mikhail Gorbachev.

There was, however, one area where the administration's rhetoric did match its actions, and that was Central America. The United States spent billions of dollars, and trained and inflamed anti-communist allies that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.