NEWS ANALYSIS : Willingness to Use Force Marks Bush’s 1st 2 Years : Foreign policy: Much like Teddy Roosevelt, the President sees military ventures as a standard option.

Like most Americans, George Bush abhors the violence and bloodshed of war. Yet more than any President in this century, he has shown that he is prepared to use military force as a standard instrument of national policy.

From massive attacks on Iraq and Panama to lesser operations on three continents in just two years as President, Bush has demonstrated that--unlike his predecessors--he sees the use of force not as a last resort but as a standard option to employ whenever he thinks vital American interests are at stake and peaceful means are too weak or too slow to protect them.

Even as vice president in 1988, a longtime aide disclosed in an interview, Bush advocated using military force against Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega, an option that President Ronald Reagan rejected on the advice of his top military aides. Bush invaded Panama in the first year of his own presidency.

Indeed, according to one of his most senior aides on foreign policy and national security, Bush and some of his closest advisers came to office determined to change what they saw as the excessive reluctance of Reagan and his immediate predecessors to use military force.

Some historians and presidential scholars say that not since George Washington warned against “foreign alliances, attachments and intrigues” in his Farewell Address in 1796 has a President been more willing to raise the issue of military force or actually to employ it as an instrument of national policy.

The only President who “spoke in a comparable way” about the use of military power, said Ernest May, a Harvard University professor of history who co-authored “Usage of History for Decision Making,” was Theodore Roosevelt, whose motto was “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

“President Bush has always been willing to use force as long as it is well planned and he considers it necessary to protect American interests,” said a senior aide, who declined to be identified. “The invasion of Panama is a good example. He ended up being the chief executive who carried it out, but he had been willing to do it during the Reagan Administration. He is not a first-resort man, but he’s not a last-resort man, either.”

Another senior government official, seeing the Bush aide’s assessment as “right on target,” said that “once the President sets his jaw and has a singleness of purpose that military action is the right way to do it, he won’t be diverted from it by somebody worrying about ‘Why don’t we wait and see if something better happens?’

“His experience is that something better is not likely to happen and you could lose your momentum and resolve by delaying the process,” the official said. “The President demonstrated that in spades in the Iraqi war. It would have been very easy to delay the ground war when Saddam Hussein started his game-playing and said he was going to leave Kuwait and attached conditions, but the President rejected that as a cruel hoax.”

As a presidential candidate in 1988, Bush pointedly included armed force among the basic elements in his approach to foreign policy: “We will integrate every available and suitable policy instrument into a multifaceted approach,” he said. “That means using negotiations, intelligence, economic strength and aid, public diplomacy and, yes, military power.”

Bush, in addition to ordering the invasion of Panama and the war against Iraq, has shown a willingness to use force in several more modest military operations.

In the midst of a summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Malta on Dec. 1, 1989, Bush took time out to be briefed on an armed rebellion against the U.S.-backed government of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines and to order American warplanes to help suppress the coup attempt by providing air cover for troops loyal to Aquino.

On Nov. 23, 1989, Bush dispatched commandos to San Salvador after rebel forces seized a hotel where American military advisers were staying. Although Bush later boasted that he had helped rescue the hostages in an operation that was launched without seeking approval from the president of El Salvador, the White House subsequently acknowledged that Salvadoran government troops actually had rescued the military advisers.

About 30 U.S. military advisers were deployed to Colombia in September, 1989, to assist in the war on drug cartels after Bush signed a National Security Decision Directive allowing troops to train Colombians in areas beyond their base camps--a move that presumably would increase the risk that U.S. forces would come under fire.

After the San Salvador operation, Bush stressed that as commander in chief he would go to “any ends” to protect American citizens. “When you see Americans held hostage like this,” he declared, “there’s a message in all of this. This President, backed by our defense secretary, is going to protect the lives of Americans wherever we can and go to any ends. . . .”

Bush also used military units in two massive rescue operations that received relatively little attention because they occurred after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

On Aug. 5, 1990, just after the Iraqi invasion, U.S. Marines launched an air-sea operation to evacuate 61 Americans and 12 others from Liberia after threats to arrest all foreigners were issued by a rebel leader in that country’s civil war.

On Jan. 3, 1991, two weeks before the U.S.-led allies began their aerial bombardment of Iraq, waves of Marine helicopters flying from two Navy ships into the heart of war-torn Somalia rescued 260 people, including the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors. The helicopters had been diverted from Operation Desert Shield in response to emergency calls for help to rescue senior diplomats from 10 nations.

And in the Persian Gulf crisis itself, although hostilities have ceased, Bush has issued two warnings to Iraq that officials said could lead to new U.S. assaults if Baghdad ignores the President’s words: Bush cautioned against any use of chemical weapons by Hussein against Iraqi dissidents and called Baghdad’s use of helicopter gunships to suppress uprisings a violation of the unofficial cease-fire agreement.

In the case of Noriega, U.S. officials first debated whether to take military action shortly after his indictment in this country on drug-smuggling charges in 1988, during the Reagan Administration. Reagan sought the advice of his top national security advisers, and, according to several sources, Secretary of State George P. Shultz proposed several military options--including sending a U.S. special operations force into Panama to kidnap Noriega and bring him to the United States to stand trial.

Military action, sources said, also was favored by two officials who now hold key positions in the Bush Administration: James A. Baker III, then the Treasury secretary and now secretary of state, and Gen. Colin L. Powell, then Reagan’s national security adviser and now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Reagan ruled out military action, sources said, after Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., counseled against it. They argued that it would result in a bloody urban guerrilla war and endanger about 10,000 American citizens in Panama.

“Bush never tipped his hand during the discussions but advised Reagan that he favored military action,” a senior Bush aide said. “Powell was ready to go, too, but he didn’t press his case too hard because his constituency was the Joint Chiefs and the defense secretary.”

Several “big changes” led to the December, 1989, invasion, this aide said: Many of the American civilians had left Panama by the end of 1989; Bush was President instead of vice president; he had named Powell chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Bush, Powell and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney “were ready to go.”

Now, in the aftermath of the crushing victory over Iraq, Bush is looking ahead to the role military power will play in the “new world order” he envisions, “where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve . . . peace and security, freedom and the rule of law,” as he put it in his State of the Union speech last Jan. 29.

Longtime Bush aides professed no surprise that Bush is more willing than most of his predecessors in the Oval Office to embrace military force as a policy option. His views have been shaped partly by his own experiences as a combat pilot during World War II, during which his plane was shot down over the Pacific, they said.

A veteran Bush aide said that the President’s “feeling on the use of force goes back to his own military days. He’s not very reflective and hasn’t talked very much about using force, but he has great respect for the military. And remember, his experience was in World War II, not Vietnam, and in conversations he keeps coming back to the threats of Hitler. He compared Iraq going into Kuwait to the Germans going into Poland.”

Aides note that Bush not only has often spoken out on the use of military force but also strongly supported three major U.S. military initiatives abroad during the eight-year Reagan presidency.

Bush never wavered in supporting the 1986 bombing of two Libyan cities in retaliation for terrorist attacks; the 1983 invasion of Grenada, with the stated purpose of protecting American medical students and other Americans from Grenada’s leftist government, and a naval patrol of the Persian Gulf to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers registered under the U.S. flag during the Iran-Iraq War.

In many speeches as vice president and as the Republican presidential nominee, Bush emphasized the role of the U.S. military in foreign policy. In 1983, for example, in ceremonies dedicating an Army reserve center in Houston, he said that the lessons of World War II should never be forgotten and that nations have no recourse but to protect themselves “against the bullies who threaten them.”

Several of Bush’s top advisers have been particularly harsh in their criticism of the Reagan Administration’s approach to the use of force. As a private citizen during Reagan’s tenure, for example, Brent Scowcroft, who as national security adviser may be Bush’s most influential aide, was scathing in his criticism of views espoused by Caspar W. Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense.

Weinberger, in a widely publicized speech, had laid out a series of tests that, he argued, must be met before the United States should send troops into action--including assurance of broad domestic political support. In the eyes of Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general, and others who shared his view, Weinberger’s tests would have all but eliminated the military as an instrument of foreign policy.

They would have allowed a President to use force only in actions on the extremes of the geopolitical scale, Scowcroft argued: on the one hand in small-bore “police actions,” such as Grenada, and on the other hand, World War III.

Early in the Persian Gulf crisis, a senior Bush official made clear that a key goal for the Administration was to prove to the world, and to the American public, that a President could use military force without tearing the nation apart.

In the Administration’s view, the official explained, a stable world requires a powerful America that can credibly threaten to use its might to enforce international rules. The President, the official said, must be free to use the military as one of several policy tools, not as a last resort to be reserved only for low-cost actions or “crusades.”

An earlier generation of policy-makers, the official said, were “traumatized” by the Vietnam War. Bush’s team, he declared, was determined to show the world that the United States had outlived that legacy.

Bush’s declaration of a “new world order” clearly envisages a much more active role for the United States and, if necessary, for its military.

In the new order Bush envisions, aides say, the President sees himself working to forge international coalitions--both diplomatic and, if required, military--to solve regional disputes, much as he did putting together the 28-nation coalition aligned against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait.

“India and Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and Central America--all of these have some tensions and fighting that could explode into larger wars that would need to be addressed,” said a senior official. “The biggest danger, of course, is India and Pakistan, since they have nuclear weapons, although we’ve never publicly confirmed that.”

A situation could develop that would require an international coalition that would not necessarily be led by the United States, the official said. “It could be an African regional war with a coalition led by African countries or it could be a coalition led by China or the Soviet Union.”

In the decades before World War II, Washington’s Farewell Address advising against foreign entanglements was quoted frequently by political leaders as justification for a strong isolationist tradition that came naturally to Americans, whose European ancestors had seen one war after another.

Even President Theodore Roosevelt, for all his bellicose rhetoric, was relatively cautious about actually using the military.

“In practice, Teddy Roosevelt was a good deal more disinclined to use force than President Bush,” said Harvard’s May, who has worked extensively with the Pentagon under several Presidents. Although Roosevelt “rejoiced” at U.S. troops taking Panama, May said, he resisted pressure from creditors of the Dominican Republic here and abroad to invade that Latin American country and barred other countries from taking such action.

The one President who may have been as inclined as Bush to use military power, May said, was James Polk, “who came into office (in 1845) bent on using force to resolve territorial disputes with the Mexicans and British. He was prepared to precipitate a war.”

Both Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower were much more reluctant to use military force than Bush, according to Robert J. Donovan, a former Times Washington Bureau chief and a biographer of both Truman and Eisenhower who covered their presidencies as a journalist. The experiences of both Truman and Eisenhower in World War II and the Korean War apparently made them cautious about the use of military power.

“Truman was forced to go into Korea,” Donovan said. “He would have been impeached if he had let South Korea fall to the Communists. He got into Korea literally not knowing what he was getting into, and when a reporter asked him if he was getting into a police action, he said, ‘Yes.’ He thought he was getting into a border skirmish.”

When the French were fighting the Vietnamese Communists in the 1950s, Donovan said, Eisenhower “was very cautious” about sending troops to relieve the embattled French forces at Dien Bien Phu. And, “when the Communists were taking over North Vietnam, he wouldn’t send troops in because he couldn’t get the French and British to go along with him.”

For his part, Bush in the Persian Gulf crisis worked ceaselessly to build and then maintain an international coalition behind his policy--a coalition that included both Britain and France.

Times staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story.

WIELDING ‘THE BIG STICK’ In addition to the Persian Gulf War, President Bush has authorized U.S. military action abroad on four other occasions: September, 1989--To help Colombia in its fight against violent cocaine cartels, about 30 U.S. military advisers are sent to train Bogota’s forces. Bush signs a National Security Decision Directive allowing U.S. troops to train Colombians in areas beyond their base camps--a move that increases the risk to the American forces.

Nov. 23, 1989--U.S. commandos are sent to El Salvador after rebels take over a hotel in San Salvador where American military advisers are staying. The rebels’ urban offensive is crushed, and Salvadoran government troops rescue the trapped Americans.

Dec. 1, 1989--U.S. jet fighters are ordered to provide air cover as loyalist troops in the Philippines seek to put down a coup attempt against President Corazon Aquino. The rebels hold Manila’s financial district for several days, effectively taking about 400 American tourists and other foreigners hostage. The coup attempt, the sixth and most serious against Aquino’s U.S.-backed regime, is crushed.

Dec. 20, 1989--14,000 U.S. troops launch a military assault on Panama with the declared aims of restoring democracy and capturing strongman Manuel A. Noriega. About 1,000 American soldiers are airlifted to join 13,000 troops stationed in Panama. Noriega is overthrown, captured and brought to America to face drug-trafficking charges. Twenty-three Americans are killed in the operation.