Overt Action Exacts a High Price : Noriega Looked Vulnerable, Now Our Intervention Does

If nothing else, our experience in Panama illustrates the perils of intervention. It all seemed so perfect: a leader who trafficked in drugs and money with both Sandinistas and Cubans, and so was unacceptable to all and sundry in the United States. If Washington couldn’t impose its will in a good cause there, where could it?

From the beginning, though, the broad U.S. consensus over Panama should have been worrying.

Even if our actions to topple Gen. Manuel A. Noriega had succeeded (which so far they have not), there would have been a price to pay. The image of U.S. respect for law would hardly have been enhanced by first using a long-arm indictment in a U.S. court as the opening salvo against Noriega, then agreeing not to extradite him if he left Panama for exile in, say, Spain.

The more important cost of success would have been the image of intervention itself. Overt intervention is still intervention. To Americans, the Latin American countries look craven in refusing to line up with us against Noriega. They do not disagree that he is rotten. But their dislike for him is more than counterbalanced by their distaste for U.S. intervention--covert or overt.

Their memories are also long enough to be suspicious of our sudden turn against a man we had protected long after there was evidence aplenty of his drug-trafficking. That protection may have been justified by other of our interests at stake, but still the turnaround is dazzling.

The United States decides from time to time that its interests require it to pay the international price of intervention. For me, getting rid of Noriega does not justify paying that price--a judgment in 20-20 hindsight. What is clear is that we should be wary of intervening just because it seems easy. And we should recognize that there is nothing virtuous about intervention just because it is open.

Indeed, the conjunction of Panama with Afghanistan or even Nicaragua should make liberals in particular rethink the issue of overt vs. covert. Throughout most of history--before Adm. John Poindexter got to it--”plausible denial” of covert operations did not mean that the operation would be a secret from its intended target, and certainly not that the head of the government resorting to covert action should be ignorant of it. Rather, the notion implied that the government acting would be able to more or less plausibly disclaim responsibility for the action, and that, if they chose, the target state and others could conduct diplomacy as though nothing were happening.

In the modern world, no covert action will long remain secret. The Reagan Administration took elaborate pains to veil its ill-fated arm sales to Iran. Even then, the operation was disclosed in less than 18 months, blown by a leak not in Washington, but in Beirut.

Paradoxically, though, even if recent American covert actions have hardly been secret, there may have been some advantage in the fact that they were at least one step removed from the United States government. In Afghanistan, in particular, the United States and the Soviet Union could negotiate around the edges of talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The superpower-to-superpower dimension was present but muted. Since the United States did not officially admit to supporting the Afghan resistance, the Soviet Union did not have to suffer the loss of face if it had backed down because of American pressure.

In Central America, there was little deniability to U.S. support for the Contras, and little desire on the part of either supporters or opponents to deny; open votes in Congress decided the fate of a “covert” operation. Yet the United States government was also at once removed: It was the Contras who acted. The United States will be affected by what happens to the Contras from here on, but the results will be less than if Washington were acting directly.

The postwar history of covert action shows how hard it is for the United States to disengage from “secret” commitments. Small interventions begat larger ones. So it was with the Bay of Pigs in 1961; so it was, too, with arms sales to Iran a quarter of a century later.

However, Panama adds a corollary to that lesson: If covert interventions create a momentum of their own, that momentum is even greater for overt intervention. Now that both President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz have said publicly that Noriega must go, the United States must make it happen. American prestige is openly committed; there is no pulling back. If Noriega does not finally behave and go, the United States will have to resort to the Marines. So much for an overt intervention that seemed so easy.