Don't resume hostilities.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Paranoia polluted U.S. policy toward Nicaragua 20 years ago. Baseless fear of ideological contagion is in danger of emerging again, as unreconstructed cold warriors react to the election of their old nemesis, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, as president on Sunday. Congress and the Bush administration should understand that history has moved forward, and that the United States' interests are best served by friendly relations with Nicaragua.

Ortega first became Nicaragua's president in 1985, six years after the Sandinistas ousted the dictator Anastazio Somoza from power. Somoza richly deserved to be overthrown, and the revolution that ended his rule was nationalist and anti-imperialist in character. Yet policymakers in Washington, D.C., conditioned to view the world through a Cold War lens, perceived the Sandinistas as puppets of Havana and Moscow. Sandinista support for rebels elsewhere in Central America led the United State to impose a crippling embargo and to finance the counter-revolutionary Contras in a war that left 30,000 dead.

The end of the Cold War in 1989 stripped the conflicts in Central America of their ideological veneer. In Nicaragua, war-weary voters defeated Ortega in his bid for re-election in 1990, confounding those who claimed the Sandinistas would never peacefully yield power. Since then Nicaraguans have struggled to deal with the aftermath of the war, and to address what have always been the real issues: poverty, injustice and corruption.

Ortega has been a candidate in every presidential election. He won on Sunday because the conservative opposition was divided, and because the constitution was changed to benefit candidates who win with a plurality. Ortega received 39 percent of the vote, giving him his long-sought comeback but leaving him in a politically weak position.

The Ortega who won Sunday is not the Ortega who governed Nicaragua in the 1980s. His running mate is a former Contra. He promises to pursue good relations with the United States, and supports the Central American Free Trade Agreement - which means the trade deal is in more trouble in Washington, D.C., than it is in Managua. He has undergone a religious conversion that is widely derided as opportunistic, but he would not be the only president to have offered public displays of faith as a campaign tactic.

Yet Ortega's victory came despite highly visible efforts by American officials to prevent it. A U.S. Agency for International Development official warned that aid to Nicaragua might be cut if Ortega were elected. The chairman of a House subcommittee asked that the Bush administration prepare to block the $500 million in remittances that Nicaraguans working in the United States send home to their families each year - a vital prop to the economy. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Col. Oliver North, a central figure in the Contra war and the Iranian weapons trade that partially financed it, openly campaigned against Ortega.

Surely no one in Washington, D.C., is worried about the Soviet shadow falling over Central America. With its series of free elections, Nicaragua shows no signs of adopting the Cuban political model. And Ortega would be unable to emulate Hugo Chavez even if he wanted to - Nicaragua doesn't have Venezuela's oil resources. Even those who saw Nicaragua as a threat in decades past would need active imaginations to see Ortega as a threat today.

The United States should reciprocate Ortega's offer of good relations, refrain from meddling and do what it can to help the hemisphere's second-poorest country, after Haiti, to move forward.