Opening Shot

Twice a year for the past two years, the House has voted to end U.S. funding for the contras, the 10,000 or so antigovernment guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua. To a majority of the House, supporting the rebels has seemed wrong on principle, or counterproductive as a check on Nicaragua's Sandinista leaders, or both. Just as regularly, the Administration has insisted that the contra war, in which some 5,000 Nicaraguans died last year, provides Washington with essential leverage in its efforts to moderate the Sandinistas' excesses. Last week the policy to and fro resumed as Congress began considering a White House request for $14 million to fund the contras.

The aid measure will probably come to a vote next month, after the White House releases a comprehensive anti-Sandinista report. A continued ban on funding would be a "serious mistake," warned Assistant Secretary of State Langhorne A. Motley last week in testimony before a House foreign affairs subcommittee. Nicaragua, he argued, would then "have no reason to compromise." Maybe so, Massachusetts Democrat Gerry Studds told Motley, but "whether you like it or not . . . support for the rebels is dead."

Liberals and moderates are hesitant to seem like apologists for the antidemocratic Sandinistas. On the other hand, there is little real enthusiasm even among most Administration officials for the contras' no-win insurgency. "It's not that we are so delighted with the policy," says one State Department official. "It's just that we cannot see what else would work and still receive any kind of support." On the Hill, there has been some discussion of dispatching nonmilitary aid to the families of the contra combatants or finding some other, aboveboard way to aid the rebels. Last week Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger suggested that he might support formal trade sanctions on the economically tottering country, which he said still "unabashedly exports subversion and terrorism."

Initially, the ostensible reason for funding the contras was to stanch the flow of aid that Nicaragua supplied to rebels in El Salvador. Now the objectives are diffuse: by keeping the Sandinistas off balance, the insurrection may soften them up to make political concessions. Yet concessions require serious negotiations and in January, Washington suspended the talks that U.S. and Nicaraguan officials had been having in Mexico since last June. The State Department is nevertheless still hopeful about persuading Congress to subsidize the contras. "Motley's testimony was only our first shot," said one official. "We have not yet begun to mount our offensive."