The Dodd doctrine.

WASHINGTON, D.C.-On August 7, in the coastal Honduran resort of Tela, five scared Central American presidents looked over their shoulders at a fickle Uncle Sam and signed what Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega called "the Contras' death warrant." Under the terms of the Tela agreement the Contras would have to disband by December 8, well before the scheduled February 25 elections in Nicaragua.

Back home in Washington the Bush Administration is trying to put a good face on the agreement by pointing out how many times the word "voluntary" appears in the document; Mr. Ortega, in a somewhat different interpretation, says that Contra troops who don't voluntarily disarm and disband will have to be "exterminated." Either way, the Sandinistas lose any incentive not to rig the election, unless aid to the Contras and their families based along the Honduran side of the border (some fifty thousand people) continues to flow through February to keep them together as a force. And this decision has now been placed in the hands of six key Democrats: Senators Robert Byrd (W.V.), Claiborne Pell (R.I.), and George Mitchell (Me.), and Representatives Thomas Foley (Wash.), Dante Fascell (Fla.), and Jamie L. Whitten (Miss.).

It was the White House itself that gave these Democrats veto power over Central American policy, in the widely trumpeted "bi-partisan" agreement this spring. In an April 28 letter to Congress, Secretary of State James Baker agreed that Contra aid already authorized and appropriated through February 28, 1990-three days after Nicaragua's election date-would end November 30 of this year unless the written consent of "the bi-partisan leadership of Congress and relevant House and Senate authorization and appropriations committees" were obtained. In other words, all that is necessary for the Sandinistas to triumph is for these Democrats to do nothing. Everyone gets to hide behind the Central American presidents.

"The Administration needs to decide what price it is willing to pay for good relations with Congress," says the former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Elliott Abrams. "Without humanitarian aid the Contras will be starved into submission. I'd put peace with Claiborne Pell and Dave Obey [Democratic Representative ftom Kansas] rather lower on the list of priorities."

More than this, President Bush needs to reconsider the whole bi-partisan approach. Granted, in areas where the two parties' goals are the same (e.g., Afghanistan) things go much easier under the bi-partisan umbrella. But where the goals are not the same, as in Central America, "bi-partisan" policy has an odd way of turning into Democratic policy. Furthermore, as the party out of the White House, the Democrats will escape all blame for consequent failures.

Thus the fearful asymmetry of the Tela accord, which spells out the demobilization of the one force that might guarantee a free election in Managua, but which offers no such timetable for the disbanding of a Nicaraguan-supplied insurgency in El Salvador threatening a country -that has already managed five free elections since 1982.

Republican leaders understandably grasped at the bi-partisan straw as a chance to buy time for the Contras, to keep them going as long as possible in the face of a Congress determined not to give them the military aid they would have needed to win. But almost from the start every such agreement was breached by Democratic leaders such as former Speaker Jim Wright (D., Tex.), who at one point during negotiations with the Reagan Administration cleared a draft proposal with the Sandinistas' congressional liaison in Washington two days before sending it on to then -Secretary of State George Shultz. This time around, the White House came up against Senator Chris Dodd's (D., Conn.) staff members in Tela, there conducting their boss's separate foreign policy. All bi-partisan efforts so far have failed, because Democratic leaders were essentially teaching the Sandinistas how to lobby Congress through the loopholes.

"Step one is for the Administration to make an issue of this," says Alan Keyes, former aide to Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. "Step two is to focus on the Democrats, to make aid to the Contras through the elections the litmus test for freedom in Central America."

A glance over the congressional record on Contra funding tells the story. In 1981 and 1982, Congress voted for covert aid. In 1983 it approved overt aid. The following year aid was cut off. In 1985 it became humanitarian aid. Military aid was resumed in 1986, and in 1987, just when it was proving effective, it was cut off. In 1988 and 1989 Congress went back to the fig leaf of humanitarian aid.

The six key Democrats who have a life-or-death hold over the Contras are not distinguished for their past support. An American Conservative Union analysis of Contra votes, for example, finds that of the Democrats in question, only the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dante Fascell, has a 100 per cent record of Contra support (he represents a heavily Cuban district). The other two House leaders, Speaker Tom Foley and Appropriations Committee Chairman Whitten, weigh in at 0 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

The Senate is even worse, with neither Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Pelt nor Appropriations Committee Chairman Byrd having ever supported the Contras; Majority Leader Mitchell is only slightly better, with a 33 per cent rating. In addition, the respective chairmen of the relevant subcommittees, Chris Dodd and David Obey, also boast perfect anti-Contra records. If any one of these people fails to send a letter requesting aid to continue, the Contras are sunk. With these odds, and the mixed signals coming from Secretary Baker, it's hard to fault the beleaguered presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica for deciding to cut the best deal they could now.

What this record suggests, furthermore, is that it wasn't the Contras who were ineffective, it was the Congress. It was, after all, the "ineffective" Contras who for five years have stood alone against a Cuban- and Sovietarmed regime in Managua. It was the ineffective Contras who in 1987 were racking up victory after victory against this same regime on the battlefield, before the Congress cut them off. And it was these same Contras whose sheer presence forced the Sandinistas to announce elections for February.

"Certainly Danny Ortega never considered the Contras ineffective," says Mr. Abrams. "All of Sandinista foreign policy has been obsessed with one goal: getting the U.S. to pull Contra aid."

Today the Sandinistas have won, and the Dodd Doctrine has triumphed. The worst part, however, is the way it has been done. In the same way that the Congress arranges for automatic pay raises that do not require a vote, in the same way that the nomination of William Lucas was prevented from going to the Senate floor for a full vote, so the sellout of the Nicaraguan Contras has been designed to avoid Democratic accountability. The American public knows all about the Sandinistas. What it needs to know is how the Democratic leadership has helped keep them in power, and the public will find out only if the White House is willing to confront the Democrats.

"In retrospect we should have blown the whistle back when we were agreeing to bi-partisan aid, and fought -and lost," says Representative Henry Hyde (R., Ill.). "At least that way we would assign responsibility for being the pallbearers of democracy in Central America where it belongs: with liberal Democrats."