ICH BIN EIN MISKITO INDIAN (via Tom Corcoran):

In Reagan's footsteps on Iraq policy (Jeff Jacoby, 11/13/2003, Boston Globe)

On Nov. 3 and 4, Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Nicaragua, a country on the front lines of the Cold War when Powell served as Reagan's national security adviser. As he stepped off the plane in Managua, he was greeted by a Nicaraguan honor guard and a military band playing the American national anthem. It was a deeply moving moment -- one that called to Powell's mind the fierce struggle two decades ago to support the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, who had taken up arms against the country's Sandinista dictatorship.

"To stand there at attention . . . hearing the Star Spangled Banner," said Powell, triggered a flashback to 1987, "when I was . . . going up to Capitol Hill every three months . . . and fighting all night long with opponents of Contra aid, to keep these guys alive and going with food and ammunition." Reagan had called the Contras "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance" in World War II -- analogies that infuriated liberal Democrats.

But Reagan's comparisons were apt. After seizing power in 1979, the Sandinistas had quickly moved to take over Nicaragua's radio and TV stations and to impose strict censorship on La Prensa, the leading newspaper. It arrested independent labor leaders. It vilified the Catholic Church, persecuted the small Jewish community, and treated evangelical Protestants with particular viciousness. It expelled thousands of Miskito Indians from their homes, forcibly relocating them to government camps. With Cuban and Soviet aid, it launched a massive military buildup.

Like all communists, the Sandinistas were ruthless toward dissenters; by 1983, their prisons held more political prisoners than any Western Hemisphere nation except Cuba. The Sandinistas also produced what all communist regimes produce: a flood of refugees. It was estimated in 1986 that one-10th of Nicaragua's population had fled from Sandinista repression.

Reagan's explicit support for the Contras was bitterly opposed by the left. Then-congressman Charles Schumer of New York snorted that Reagan offered "the same exact arguments that we were hearing in the mid-'60s about Vietnam"; Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut warned that Americans would be fighting "the tide of history" if it backed the Contras -- "we will . . . find ourselves once again on the losing side."

But in the end, it was the Sandinistas and their totalitarian dreams that went down to defeat.

Thank you, Ollie North, Bud McFarlane, and Admiral Poindexter.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2003 7:00 PM