A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaragua Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era.

• Author: Landau, Saul

If some clever member of President Bill Clinton's legal staff were to read

William Robinson's book, he might order an investigation into the multiple improprieties that Bush Administration officials pulled in rigging the 1990 Nicaraguan election. Indeed, we might have four years of digging into the behavior of national-security officials who "did not content themselves," as the late Senator Sam Ervin would have said, "to remain on the windy side of the law."

But don't hold your breath. President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have embraced the democracy crusade and welcomed into their ranks some of the neocons who jumped like rats from the sinking Reagan ship. Others - before George Bush granted their Christmas Eve pardons - complained bitterly about the injustice done to them by vengeful special prosecutors.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliot Abrams, for example, published an apologia titled Undue Process: How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes. Rather than risk serving time for lying to Congress, Abrams copped a plea to several misdemeanors. But, instead of seeing his behavior as destructive of life in Nicaragua and inimical to the democratic process at home, Abrams whines about how his career was damaged and his life interrupted. He shows no awareness that he violated the primary moral and legal codes of democracy.

In one passage - which Gore Vidal might have, but didn't, write as parody - Abrams reveals the depth of his thinking. Fearing his children will read about the scandal, Abrams tries to clarify the issues for them. The United States, he explains, was "fighting the communists in Nicaragua. Well, I knew lots of secrets about that, and Secretary Shultz and President Reagan didn't want me to tell. Now, some people are saying, you should have told Congress. You had to tell. When they asked you, you had to tell, and not telling is a crime. And I'm shying, no, it isn't."

Abrams as Faust? Besides money and the pleasure of beating up a weaker adversary, what did the national-security mavens receive for selling out U.S. law? Did any of them possess a soul worthy of a devil's bargain? And if so, what knowledge - power - could they have hoped to gain from defeating the Sandinistas? I can see the nuclear gang back in the 1940s trading their essences for an atomic monopoly, but the people engaged in trying to cook the 1990 Nicaraguan election, as Robinson portrays them, are less than heroic in their ambition.

Robinson picks up the intervention story where Peter Kornbluh's Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention left off, in the mid-1980s. After the phase-out of multiple covert operations in the late...