Unnecessary Deployment

You can understand the concern for the safety of U.S. citizens that prompted President Bush to send additional troops to Panama. But it appears that the decision was unnecessary, given the advantage U.S. forces in that country already have over any local military challenge they might face, and the international pressure that is already coming to bear on that country’s strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega.

Granted, the actions of Noriega and his supporters grow more brutish and appalling with each day that passes in Panama’s political crisis. The bloody public beatings of opposition political leaders that took place Wednesday must anger all decent people. They graphically illustrate what Panamanians have been telling anyone who would listen for two years--that their country is ruled not by a legitimate government, but by a clique of political gangsters and their hired thugs. Noriega, who has been indicted in this country because of his suspected drug deals, is the godfather of this Panamanian mafia.

It is sad that it took televised brutality to finally bring the world’s condemnation down on Noriega. But, as often happens in such cases, the repressive acts of a dictator have come back to haunt him. Within hours of the attack on Guillermo Endara, the opposition presidential candidate who has pledged to remove Noriega as head of the Panama Defense Forces, democratic governments all over Europe and Latin America called for Noriega’s ouster. More important, the Latin American nations began moving to isolate the Panamanian regime through the Organization of American States. Similar pressure helped remove Nicaragua’s former dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in 1979, and it is the best way to try to get Noriega out now.

So it is unfortunate that Bush was not content to focus on the campaign to isolate Noriega diplomatically and chose to take unilateral military action as well. As Navy Adm. William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pointed out, the 11,000 American military personnel based in the Panama Canal Zone already outnumber Panama’s regular army, and they are equipped with vastly superior weaponry. The presence of these U.S. forces in Panama has always been a sensitive issue to Latin America, and by ordering in 2,000 more troops, Bush could make it more difficult for Latin Americans to join him in a united front against Noriega. We hope the President has not handed Noriega a straw he can grasp at in his increasingly desperate fight to survive.