Contra-dictory Solutions

TO ALL FORMER auto-workers displaced from Michigan who are now former service workers unemployed in depressed Texas, here's a suggestion: Pack up your U-Hauls and drive even further south.

Come to Nicaragua. It's a beautiful, hilly nation with which you're bound to fall in love. The country is admittedly a little too hot but the two-day trip down through Mexico is well worth it, because Nicaragua is about to be hit with a gigantic economic shot in the arm.

Warfare is about to become a part of the ever expanding service sector of the Pan-American economy. Instead of relying on our own industrial strength, made-in-America troops, President Reagan plans to hire cheaper, foreign models to fight the war he wants fought in Nicaragua. But there's sure to be some job openings for Americans in servicing these troops and perhaps, for the more adventurous, in waging war.

How is this boon possible? Thanks to a week-kneed House of Representatives, American taxpayer money will start pouring into this small nation in order to fund a war between the Nicaraguan government and a group of rebels known as the Contras. On Wednesday, the House about-faced 221-209 on its earlier opposition to such aid and narrowly approved a $100 million aid package for the Contras. All that the President Reagan-backed bill needs to become law is approval by the Senate, which has already voted in favor of the bill once.

But it's not the sure-bet economic benefits that Reagan trumpets as the reasons behind his funding a war there. The causus belli is the current government of Nicaragua which Reagan wants to overthrow. Communist revolutionaries, the Nicaraguan leaders have tied themselves closely with the Soviet Union. President Reagan fears that with another Soviet backed country very close to the American border, that other being Cuba, the safety of the United States is compromised.

While it's fair to say that the presence of a Soviet-backed nation in Central America has made the U.S. a little more nervous and antsy, the way in which Reagan has chosen to handle this threat will only aggravate the problem.

As long as Central America is unstable, the Nicaraguans will continue to latch on to the Soviet Union. The war the United States is about to fund will destablize that region, thereby increasing the threat to our borders. But even more distressing is the fact that the decision to send money to the contras will also fuel the rhetorical fire of leftists trying to sway the peoples of other Central American nations.

Reagan knows that sending his own troops to Nicaragua would be politically impossible so instead he buys rebels, mainly people who were deposed by the Sandinista revolution or in disfavor with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Like the condottieri of renaissance Italy, these Contras live very well off of American money. (The House voted to give the contras $30 million in economic aid when these rebels don't even have a bureacracy to distribute it. It's likely that a lot of this money will end up in hands of Miami merchants.) The United States, by hiring these mercenaries, fits very snugly into the rich imperialist stereotype communists paint of America.

And that's the rub. The U.S. has yet to resolve itself into a firm stand against Nicaragua. We certainly don't feel strongly enough to send our own soldiers and most polls show that Americans don't favor funding the Contras. A $100 million out of a trillion dollar budget is a mere trifle for the House to spend in order to relieve some of the pressure about the threat to the south placed on them by Reagan and other conservatives.

Yet to the people of Central America that money means a lot, a lot of killing and a lot of destruction. Rather the House gave in to the Reagan idealogues and accepted their unthinking response.

What the United States needs to do in Central America is to swoon Nicaragua away from the Soviet Union. Currently, the administration philosophy is that communism is an incurable cancer which must be rooted out violently. But we have other cures available to us which do not have the pernicious side effects of warfare. Let's spend our money efficiently on economic aid to that nation. Something the Soviet Union doesn't have the funds to do.

As conservative Reaganites have often said of liberal tendencies to spend too much money on social problems, dollars don't simply solve problems. The same goes in warfare. Let's think about where America's funds are going and what the nation's goal is in Central America before causing a big monetary migration to the south.