EVEN IF we say, which I am fearful of doing, that the Iran-contra scandal diminishes the likelihood of immediate American military involvement in Central America, the visible fact remains that the Reagan Administration's policy toward Nicaragua is a war policy. It is not easy to look at this policy and conclude that the Unites States is in anything less than a prolonged pre-war period at present. Whether Congress gives the contras $100 million, $500 million, or nothing at all, the current realities indicate that the proxy war will continue and that the contras can't win.

As long as our policy remains the same, the contras are the bearers of the expressed national will. When they fail, as military strategists confidently expect them ultimately to do, we will have no choices other than to rescue them or suffer humiliating defeat in an area only a short drive, as President Reagan likes to say, from Harlingen, Texas. We'll be in big trouble with our little war. This time college students won't be exempt. Proximity, along with the spread of the war itself to Central American neighbors, will require universal mobilization.

But wait, isn't this too crazy to be believable? It may be mad, but current policy does head us toward war. We will be a lot madder if we don't look before we have already leapt.

THE FUROR over Nicaragua, the transformation of a cartographer's flyspeck (largest of the Central American republics, but what does that mean?) into a superpower obsession, turns on a simple conceit: We don't know anything about Nicaragua, but we do know exactly what is good for it. What we generally mean when we talk about what is best for others is what is best for us.

In hemispheric affairs that is usually taken to mean we must prevent communism from jumping to the North American mainland. Well, great. But even assuming communism is like a weather front or measles, spreadable as pollen on the wind, we may be more responsible for its currency in the Third World than the Soviets. I found Nicaraguans much fonder of Americans than of Russians, but far angrier at the U.S. Government than at anything the USSR has done. Nicaragua is a country where veneration for Marx, though well advanced in some circles, is considerably less than the veneration for the Virgin Mary in those same circles. Try saying that about Poland of Cuba, and you begin to appreciate the ambiguities of Nicaragua.

After 14 landings by the U.S. Marines over the past century and a quarter, the last occupation covering seven years in the 1920s and 1930s while the marines chased Augusto Cesar Sandino, Nicaraguans have come to feel they should be surprised by nothing the United States undertakes to do to them. When we were unable to catch up to Sandino, the Marines withdrew, installing the Somoza dynasty in their stead. The first Somoza caught up with Sandino almost immediately and had him assassinated.

"I'll bring this country peace," Somoza I was reported to have said, "if I have to kill every other man in Nicaragua." Somoza I was followed by Somoza II and III, all supported politically and financially by the United States. The dynasty reached its fullest flower with Somoza III, who sold everything he could find in Nicaragua, including the blood of his fellow citizens, to the United States. The Somozas persevered until they were overthrown by Sandino's spiritual successors, the Sandinistas, in 1979.

If I had gone to Nicaragua to write a cookbook, I would have returned with at least one fairly serviceable, all-purpose left-wing dish. Recipe for a Communist: Preheat a Third World dictatorship whose principal devotions are to its own maintenance and anti-Communism; coddle an oligarchy that controls 90 percent of the national wealth; skin off an educated middle class through exile or intimidation; chill dissent by suppression; crush peasants and workers with hunger and debts that make progress impossible; let foreign corporations porations drain the country of raw materials; stir in an army that reports only to the dictator and operates through terror and torture; garnish with corruption; combine all ingredients with sponsorship by the world's biggest economic power; simmer 40 years.

It works well. What is produced is the exact opposite of what is intended by the original anti-Communists. The Communists themselves cannot do it nearly as successfully. From Batista to Diem to Lon Nol to Somoza to Marcos and beyond, Communist subversion has not been as effective as American support.

To punish the Sandinistas for their disobedience, we have decreed the contras. In arming and pushing the contras into battle against the Sandinistas, the United States has created a scenario. If we support the contras, we place our national interest in their hands. If the contras cannot win, as no one in Washington or Managua expects them to do by themselves, sooner or later the United States has to send troops to their rescue or sacrifice our credibility as an ally. If we rescue effectively, we have to invade.

If we invade Nicaragua, we have, of course, to win or lose. If we lose, we lose big, as in Vietnam, but more humiliating because of where Nicaragua is. If we win, we conquer the territory. If we conquer, we have to administer, either by ourselves or through a new creature of our imagination and potency such as the Somozas were, we can turn Central America, Mexico and much of South America into potential enemies and therefore into--by our own definition of enemy--Communists.

"We both made the history of this hemisphere," Carlos Fuentes ringingly told a Harvard Commencement audience. "We must both remember it. We must both imagine it." Until the United States incorporates Nicaragua into our memory, we will not be able to imagine it. And until we can imagine it, we will not begin to see Nicaragua.

Peter Davis '57 is the author of Where Is Nicaragua?, published by Simon and Schuster in April.