The Imperial Myth Deflates : Panama: Liberals were sure U.S. intervention would arouse Panamanian nationalism. It did--against Noriega.

The storming of Panama that overthrew Manuel Noriega battered some cherished liberal myths in the process. Among the minor casualties was the notion that George Bush had too much to fear from Noriega to bring him here for trial. The major casuality was the belief that a U.S. intervention anywhere in Latin America must be repudiated by the local population.

Just before Noriega’s escape into the Vatican embassy, a leading exponent of this view, former Ambassador Robert White, warned in a television interview that the invasion “arouses the nationalism of the people.” Popular nationalism, said this diplomat with a distinguished record of service in the region, would enable Noriega to “remain at large and lead a guerrilla operation against American troops,” leaving the United States “bogged down, with . . . much loss of life from guerrilla operations and street-to-street fighting.” Similar expectations were widely voiced by news correspondents, media pundits and Latin American experts.

In actuality, Panamanian nationalism was expressed in demonstrations against Noriega, not the United States. “There’s nothing we can do to hold back these people,” said a U.S. soldier standing guard outside the Vatican embassy Wednesday as tens of thousands of Panamanians massed to demand that Noriega be turned over to the U.S. Army. It was word of this menacing crowd that persuaded Noriega to stop imposing on the Pope’s hospitality. On hearing of his surrender, the gleeful demonstrators spread across the city, forcing U.S. troops to give up trying to enforce the nightly curfew that had been in place since the invasion.

Nonetheless, the media and the professors still insist on calling the new Panamanian regime led by President Guillermo Endara a creature of the U.S. government. They ignore the fact that Panamanians elected the Endara ticket by a 3-1 majority despite Noriega’s goons. The people then sustained an opposition that braved bloody beatings and torture by Noriega’s so-called Dignity Battalions.

Is the history of popular resistance to Noriega ignored because it was sparked in September, 1985, by one Hugo Spadafora? A former Panamanian vice minister of health, he joined the Sandinistas to fight Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. When the Sandinistas won and then suppressed their democratic allies, Spadafora joined other ex-Sandinistas and Miskito Indians to fight the new Nicaraguan dictatorship. When Spadafora returned to Panama and denounced Gen. Noriega’s corruption, he was tortured and beheaded. The slaughter of the popular hero sent thousands of Panamanians into the streets calling for justice in what eventually became the anti-Noriega electoral movement.

The popular movement was reborn Wednesday in the mass demonstration outside the Vatican embassy. It was not only against Noriega; it also demanded an end to the repressive militarism of the Panamanian Defense Forces.

The PDF, as Noriega had renamed the National Guard, was created by the United States in the 1960s to help defend the canal, was backed morally and politically in the 1970s by American liberal champions of the “progressive and nationalist military” in places like Panama and Peru, and turned into a monster fed by Colombian drug money in the 1980s.

Lately, Noriega’s main allies have been the Sandinistas and the Cubans, who sent teams of advisers to carry out such glorious tasks as organizing the notorious Dignity Battalions. These confederations of ex-cons and self-styled revolutionaries terrorized the population during the Noriega years, and in response to the U.S. invasion looted and burned whole neighborhoods. They are modeled on the Sandinista turbas , who are even now bullying Nicaragua’s democratic opposition with Noriega-style tactics. Domestically, a fundamental mainstay of Noriega’s rule was the Communist People’s Party, which supplied leadership for the Dignity Battalions.

It is true that most Latin leaders condemned the invasion, at least publicly. Anti-Americanism remains a handy if worn demagogic tool for elites needing a whipping boy on which to pin their own fiascoes. But even the Organization of American States rejected Cuba and Nicaragua’s bid to condemn the United States in favor of a much milder reproach. That reproach was itself reproached overwhelmingly by those Latins most affected and most entitled to speak, the Panamanians themselves.

None of this justifies a return to the bad old days when the United States felt entitled to intervene in the region at will. History--the U.S. building of the canal, our presence in the Canal Zone, our creation of the National Guard and of Panama itself--makes this a special case. But it is time that some liberals pulled their heads out of the rubble long enough to notice that their Imperial Myth is walking around naked. They could start by thinking through the concept of “U.S. intervention” from the point of view of the people involved. Grenada today is a functioning democracy and enjoys sufficient independence from the United States to have voted with the Latin bloc in U.N. and OAS resolutions against the invasion.

There is a difference between an intervention that imposes a dictator and one that removes one. A patron saint of true modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, wrote: “The doctrine of non-intervention, to be a legitimate principle of morality, must be accepted by all governments. The despots must consent to be bound by it as well as the free States. Unless they do, the profession of it by free countries comes but to this miserable issue, that the wrong side may help the wrong, but the right must not help the right.” It would be a sad irony if a perverse tenacity leads liberals to become the new apologists for the tyrannies that liberalism was created to oppose.