When the Bells of Victory Ring : Panama: The devastated little country is far less the victim of some home-grown dictator than of the great Cold War, one of the final fallen of that crusade.

In his classic work on historical irony, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Paul Fussell describes how the gifted young English poet Wilfred Owen was machine-gunned to death on the Western Front at the very close of World War I.

“The Armistice bells had been pealing for an hour in Shrewsbury,” Fussell writes, “when the telegram arrived at his parents’ house.”

There is much the same air of senselessness and loss as Washington’s figurative bells of chauvinism and self-congratulation ring out over our little Christmas invasion of Central America. Like Wilfred Owen, Panama itself is, in a sense, a last tragic casualty of a long and bitter conflict. And in the roar and swoop of U.S. helicopters over a Latin capital, as in that final bloody staccato of machine guns on the Sambre, historians will surely record something forlorn and vastly irrelevant.

Irony, of course, is nothing new to the Panamanians. Their fragile sovereignty began as the creature of one of the first of our covert actions south of the border nearly 90 years ago. They were carved away from Colombia by U.S. scheming and money to provide a reliable client regime sheathing Teddy Roosevelt’s new canal across the isthmus. Now, in chronic social and economic ruin as well as the rubble of the U.S. attack, Panama seems more than ever a sacrifice to larger forces. For behind the headlines, the devastated little country is far less the victim of some home-grown dictator than of the great Cold War between the United States and the communist legions, one of the final fallen on an old battlefield of that exhausted, exhausting crusade.

Never mind the conventional furor or political criticism around George Bush’s good-neighborism-by-gunship. Never mind the flouting of international law in the name of justice, or the reflexive, practiced intervention by a United States unctuously preaching nonintervention to the rest of the world--and especially to Central America. No serious Latin from Mexico City to Buenos Aires believes our hemispheric policy is anything but expedient hypocrisy. As in the case of Richard Nixon’s furtive bombing of Cambodia 20 years ago, Washington confects its rationale for such acts and hoards its secrets, not to delude the foreign victims--who tend to know when they are being bought, sold, bombed and invaded--so much as to conceal the unseemly truth from ourselves.

No, the real ironies of Panama lie deeper, in the hidden reality of the Noriega tyranny, in the roots of Panamanian poverty and, ultimately, in the Cold War that perpetuated them all. Manuel Noriega, of course, was a sick, drug-running little martinette. But he was, from the beginning until very lately, our sick, drug-running little martinette. The general was on the payroll of the Defense Intelligence Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency from the moment he helped Gen. Omar Torrijos maintain power in the turmoil of the 1970s, through his own complicity (well known by U.S. intelligence) in events surrounding Torrijos’ mysterious death in 1981 and, most of all, through the early and mid-1980s, when the Reagan Administration beseeched the general to aid the Nicaraguan Contras, and in return not only continued to pay Noriega’s strategic annuity but to overlook his flourishing avocation as cocaine middleman.

There is a sense in which Noriega’s defiant defection and eventual fall was a last act in the Iran-Contra scandal of which we have still unraveled only a fraction. Yet the larger point is that none of this--none of the squalid subsidies or unholy alliances--is really plausible without the ongoing Cold War, Washington’s institutionalized fear and unreasoning fervor that hired out so many despots, justified so many means by the end, made so many Faustian bargains, just as heedless general staffs of World War I once hurled men across the trenches into no man’s land.

The story is much the same with Panama’s poverty and with the savage want of most of the Third World. Cynics can argue that the Panamanians and others got what little they have in foreign aid only because of the Cold War, only because the Soviet or Chinese or Cuban bogyman was there to frighten otherwise parochial Congresses and Presidents into strained mercy. As it was, most of our Latin aid went--another nice little irony--for automatic weapons and fashionably camouflaged uniforms of the sort Gen. Noriega carried with him as he fled into the Vatican Embassy.

Yet with or without U.S. foreign aid, it was certainly the Cold War and Washington’s nervous resort to reaction, the ready alliances with local oligarchs, the blind equation of genuine economic change in Latin America with communist subversion, that prevented in Panama and elsewhere the desperately needed reforms that the backing of Washington could well have made possible. The result of our fearful folly is everywhere in the region, in so many places where--now that the Cold War is ending, now that the vaunted Soviet threat is exposed for what it always was--our spent empire has no more resources to give. If you seek a monument to the crusade, look around at the slums of Panama City, San Salvador, Managua, the legacy of our exertions for peace and security.

Paul Fussell does not tell us whether anyone was there to see or hear Wilfred Owen or others like him die in that final futile charge in France in 1918. There may be no one there in the 1990s in Panama, when the U.S. troops have eventually gone home, to hear the children who starve, the old who die, because of the changes that will have come too late if at all, the help we can no longer conspire or be frightened to give.

When the bells of victory ring, last casualties are soon forgotten. It is part of the irony.