By 1984, the contras had earned a reputation for rape, torture, murder and terrorism -- as they ravaged towns especially along Nicaragua's northern border. In 1983-84, the CIA also had used the cover of the contra war to plant mines in Nicaragua's harbors, an operation later condemned by the World Court.
But Gates offered none of this context in his five-page memo to Casey, who was a strong advocate of the contra cause. The memo made no serious analytical attempt to gauge whether Nicaragua -- the target of aggression by a nearby superpower, the United States -- might have been trying to build up forces to deter more direct U.S. intervention.
Instead, Gates told his boss what he wanted to hear. "The Soviets and Cubans are turning Nicaragua into an armed camp with military forces far beyond its defensive needs and in a position to intimidate and coerce its neighbors, Gates wrote.
After laying out his premises, Gates moved to his conclusion -- that there was no hope the Sandinistas would accept democracy, even if the contras remained in the field, and thus there was no choice but to oust the Sandinistas by force. Gates wrote:
"It seems to me that the only way that we can prevent disaster in Central America is to acknowledge openly what some have argued privately: that the existence of a Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua closely allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba is unacceptable to the United States and that the United States will do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out.
"Hopes of causing the regime to reform itself for a more pluralistic government are essentially silly and hopeless. Moreover, few believe that all those weapons and the more to come are only for defense purposes.
Tough Talk
Dressing up his recommendations as hardheaded realism, Gates added:
"Once you accept that ridding the Continent of this regime is important to our national interest and must be our primary objective, the issue then becomes a stark one. You either acknowledge that you are willing to take all necessary measures (short of military invasion) to bring down that regime or you admit that you do not have the will to do anything about the problem and you make the best deal you can.
"Casting aside all fictions, it is the latter course we are on. " Any negotiated agreement simply will offer a cover for the consolidation of the regime and two or three years from now we will be in considerably worse shape than we are now.
Gates then called for withdrawing diplomatic recognition of the Nicaraguan government, backing a government-in-exile, imposing an economic embargo on exports and imports "to maximize the economic dislocation of the regime, and launching "air strikes to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua's military buildup (focusing particularly on the tanks and the helicopters).
In the memo, Gates depicted those who would do less as weaklings and fools, including some administration officials who favored focusing on arranging new covert aid to the contras.
"These are hard measures, Gates wrote about his recommendations. "They probably are politically unacceptable. But it is time to stop fooling ourselves about what is going to happen in Central America. Putting our heads in the sand will not prevent the events that I outlined at the beginning of this note. "
"The fact is that the Western Hemisphere is the sphere of influence of the United States. If we have decided totally to abandon the Monroe Doctrine, if in the 1980's taking strong actions to protect our interests despite the hail of criticism is too difficult, then we ought to save political capital in Washington, acknowledge our helplessness and stop wasting everybody's time.
Despite Gates's history -- as either an opportunist or an extremist depending on whether you think he actually believed his own words or was just currying favor with his boss -- he has been embraced as something of a new Wise Man in today's Washington, a favorite of the city's insider press corps.
After Obama won in November 2008, some of Obama's clever aides pushed the President-elect to retain Gates as a signal of Obama's sincere desire for bipartisanship. Similarly, Obama reached out to his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, whose hard line in the Middle East made her a Democrat acceptable to Washington's influential neocon community.
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