COMBAT IN PANAMA : Thatcher Alone in All-Out Support for Attack

The only major nation to give wholehearted public support Wednesday to the U.S. military incursion into Panama was Britain, whose longstanding “special relationship” with Washington has come under question this year.

“Someone has to uphold democracy,” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared to journalists after an early-morning phone call from President Bush advising her of the operation.

“It was a courageous decision,” Thatcher said. “The more leaders of government who believe passionately in democracy and make clear they support the United States, the more swiftly that action will be brought to a conclusion.”

America’s other principal European allies either avoided public comment or issued equivocal statements, while elsewhere, criticism ranged from mild to furious.

“Compared to the American Western Nazis and their allies, Nero and Hitler were angels,” Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi said in a statement published by the official Libyan news agency and relayed by Agence France- Presse in Paris.

“In light of such barbarism,” Kadafi added, “I can only invite all of the people of the small countries of the world to immediately unite and prepare themselves to resist.”

France was waiting for “the maximum amount of information” before reacting to the news, a Foreign Ministry official in Paris said.

In Bonn, an official statement from the West German government said authorities there “hope that the military clash will soon be over and human lives saved, and that the way becomes free for the democratic freedom of the country as demanded by the European Community.”

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama also said he hopes the confrontation would end soon. And in Canada, External Affairs Minister Joe Clark tempered his sympathy over American motives with regret because “intervention by force is a dangerous precedent.”

Yugoslavia, which is a major force in the nonaligned movement, also described the U.S. action as “unacceptable” and “a crude violation of sovereignty,” according to a Foreign Ministry statement from Belgrade.

Francois Heisbourg, director of London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, predicted that ultimately U.S. allies’ “reactions will be a function of (the) success or failure” of the Panama action. “The problem with these operations is that they have to succeed.”

Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek said in a radio interview that he sympathizes with the U.S. decision because of the danger to American troops in the former Canal Zone. But his Spanish counterpart, Francisco Fernandez Ordonez, said he “deeply lamented” the U.S. action. He said that Spain, “which always has been opposed to foreign military intervention, expresses its hope that the Panamanian people can decide their future in freedom.”

Despite the recent thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, the Soviet Union deplored the U.S. invasion as “aggression.” But U.S. diplomats in Moscow asserted that the Soviets’ private reaction was milder and contained expressions of hope that U.S.-Soviet relations will suffer no lasting setback.

“We were a bit surprised by the tone and degree of their public criticism,” one American conceded. “It was more aggressive than we might have expected. But based on our private conversations, we see no long-term, substantive problems between Washington and Moscow because of this.”

A Soviet source in Moscow appeared to agree with this suggestion. “It is, without a doubt, an irritant in the public arena,” he said of the Panama incursion, “but it will not affect the course of Soviet-American relations.”

Secretary of State James A. Baker III said President Bush informed Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the military move just as it was beginning. Baker suggested that initial Soviet criticism came before the Kremlin had received the Bush message.

In Britain, opposition parties lashed out at the Thatcher government’s endorsement during a brief but heated exchange after a statement by Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd in the House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon.

“However (Hurd) dresses it up, the American invasion of Panama City is an act of naked aggression against the sovereignty of that country,” said Tony Banks, a leader of the rival Labor Party. “When will the government stop acting as apologist for every act of aggression perpetrated by the United States?”

Times staff writers Robert C. Toth in Washington and Masha Hamilton in Moscow also contributed to this article.