A Muscle-Bound America Truly Has Few Options to Chase Bad Guys Away

Our attempts to get rid of Gen. Manuel A. Noriega of Panama have--at least until now--proved so ineffectual that they resemble the short act sequences of a comic opera.

The curtain opens as our government reveals that this reliable anti-communist ally of ours has been a big wholesale drug dealer. The figurehead president attempts to fire the general and gets the ax instead. We continue to recognize him as the true leader of Panama. We set him up in a secret house where he mumbles his recitativo. We put economic pressure on the dictator, which enables him to rise and belt out the popular Latin American aria “Against Yankee Imperialism.” We try to bribe him to levant off to Spain with all his loot and our promise of an American Express Gold Card. But he prefers to stay where he is. We fly American troops into Panama, where they are milling around in their enclaves. The sixth act is yet to come, but after nearly two months of Uncle Sam’s political and financial and economic and diplomatic and military acts, the grin on Noriega’s pock-marked face is still wide.

We may laugh at this but the matter is serious. It shows that the United States is muscle-bound. We may shoot men to the moon, we may blow up half of the world, we have advanced from gunboat diplomacy to Cap’n Weinberger’s bequest of a 600-ship Navy. Yet we cannot get rid of Noriega--as indeed we failed to get rid of Fidel Castro, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Moammar Kadafi, Daniel Ortega or Ho Chi Minh. A blockade will not do it. Economic pressure will not do it. Air power will not do it. There is one way to do it. Invade Panama City--go to war. We chose not to invade Havana or Hanoi or Tehran. (We did invade . . . Grenada.) We will not invade Panama, I think.

The last time the United States got rid of a Latin American government without an invasion was in Guatemala in 1954. That was an easy CIA operation, dependent on a group of Guatemalan Contras. What few people, including the CIA, understand is how that kind of a success was not the first but the last of its kind.

We are not alone in this. Forty years ago Josef Stalin wanted to get rid of Marshal Tito; he could not do it, short of an invasion of Yugoslavia for which he did not have the nerve. His successors--Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri V. Andropov, Mikhail S. Gorbachev--would, I think, enjoy getting rid of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (a man as unsavory as Noriega). Unless the Red Army marches into Romania, it is impossible.

This raises another question. Should the United States try to get rid of dictators at all?

Noriega’s Panama (just as Ortega’s Nicaragua, or Castro’s Cuba, or Kadafi’s Libya or Khomeini’s Iran) is an independent republic. The United States liberated Cuba from Spain; we supported the creation of an independent Libya; we helped Iran to free itself from British and Russian spheres of influence. In the case of Panama we actually invented an entire country. We made it up, including its national flag (which American Grace Bigelow and Mme. Bunau-Varilla of France, having bought the material at Macy’s, designed and stitched together on a sunny October afternoon in 1903 at the Bigelow estate in New York).

In 1776 we were the first colonial people who declared their independence. We are no longer alone in this. We have had hordes of imitators. Of the nearly 200 sovereign states of the world, the vast majority are former colonial countries, all of which at one time or another produced their own declarations of independence. But there the parallel ends. The first of these countries that declared its independence after the United States was Haiti. The history of its political freedoms during the last 200 years is not inspiring. Nor is that of many other countries in Central or South America or Asia or Africa. It was Aristotle who first suggested that every people will have the government they deserve.

It is not the Declaration of Independence that made the United States prosperous and free. It is its constitutional government and its observance of the lawful liberties that it had inherited from England. There is, God knows, plenty that is wrong with our party-ridden electoral practices. Still, what is good for America is good for America--and not necessarily for the rest of the world.

Seventy-five years ago, when Woodrow Wilson was itching to intervene in Mexico, a British envoy asked him what his purposes really were. “I want,” said this professor-President, “to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” It did not work then. To bribe Latin American bad men to take their loot and go away won’t work either. It was not until World War I that an American President declared that the task of the United States was to make the world safe for democracy. That was a more revolutionary--and perhaps an even more disastrous--idea than the international workers’ revolution declared by Wilson’s contemporary, Lenin. It is odd how this Wilsonian idea has now been embraced by all of our so-called “conservatives,” including Ronald Reagan whose middle name, perhaps by coincidence, happens to be Wilson.