TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012191/0121640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 130 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 74

Who Wants Another Panama?


By Barbara Ehrenreich


    We don't want another Vietnam, everyone says, squinting into
the desert sun. We want something swift and decisive, short and
sweet -- a Panama perhaps. For these are the two poles of our
collective military memory: on the one hand, the quicksand of
Vietnam; on the other, the "brilliant success" of Panama, or
so it was heralded at the time -- a military action so
flawless, so perfectly executed that, as one of the generals
responsible for carrying out the invasion boasted shortly
afterward, "There were no lessons learned."

    On Dec. 20, 1989, you will recall, the U.S. Army invaded the
nation of Panama and soon thereafter arrested its de facto head
of state. The U.N. General Assembly swiftly denounced the
invasion as a "flagrant violation of international law," but
never mind -- for most Americans, the lofty ends justified the
brutal and lawless means. We had to stop the drug traffic. We
had to restore stability and, as usual where guns and flag
waving are involved, democracy.

    Now, more than a year after the arrest of the loathsome
dictator, it's fair to ask: What did we accomplish in Panama?
Because if Panama is to be our standard for success and the
yardstick by which any action in the Persian Gulf may be
measured, we ought to know what "success" looks like -- after
the smoke clears, that is, and the dead have all been laid to
rest.

    First, there's the matter of drugs. In August 1990 the New
York Times reported that according to Panamanian pilots and
dockworkers, the cocaine traffic was back to preinvasion levels
and, if anything, "more open and abundant than before."
American officials believe that the Panamanian banking industry
still serves as a Laundromat for the hemisphere's cocaine
profits, but the U.S.-installed government of Guillermo Endara
is resisting a pact that would help catch drug-money
depositors.

    Democracy is a little harder to assess, but by all accounts
most of the gains have accrued to Panama's tiny, white-skinned
elite of wealth. In the wake of the invasion, labor unions have
been repressed and nonwhites shut out of high-ranking
government positions. With unemployment running at more than
25%, crime is rampant, and angry protest marches are once again
a common sight. President Endara, who is notoriously
indifferent to the nation's low-income majority, has so far
refused to legitimate his apparent preinvasion victory with new
elections -- a tactless omission for a man who was sworn in,
with few Panamanians even present, on a U.S. military base.

    Then there's the dictator. When Manuel Noriega was
apprehended, some commentators wondered whether he would ever
really be brought to trial, given what he might reveal about
his long association with former CIA Director George Bush. They
were right to wonder. With the revelation -- mysteriously
leaked to CNN -- that the U.S. government has been
eavesdropping on Noriega's conversations with his lawyers, the
prosecution may have opened the door for Noriega to walk,
untried, to a relaxing life in exile.

    So that's the sordid aftermath of Operation Just Cause, as
the invasion was called. And the human cost? Twenty-three
American service members' lives -- which is not bad unless one
of them happened to be your husband, son, sweetheart or father
-- and the lives of somewhere between 202 (the U.S. estimate)
and 4,000 Panamanian civilians. That may not sound so bad
either, until you recall that the number of Kuwaiti deaths in
the Iraqi invasion was in the same general range: between
"hundreds" (Amnesty International's estimate) and 7,000
(according  to exiled Kuwaitis).

    If this was "success," one shudders to think what failure
might look like. And one shudders with particular horror
because the same tape is now on instant replay: a cruel thug
and former U.S. ally, who just happens to be sitting on a key
resource (oil this time, the canal in Noriega's case), has been
singled out as the President's personal nemesis and casus belli
-- only that the outcome, this time around, is likely to be
infinitely bloodier. With all due respect to the general cited
above, Panama may, after all, hold a lesson to be learned.

    The first, it seems to me, has to do with the limits of
official foresight. Conservative ideologues talk about a "law
of unintended consequences," which means, roughly, that the
effort to fix things sometimes worsens the damage. Of course,
the ideologues apply the "law" selectively, as an argument
against antipoverty efforts, not military ventures abroad.

    But if anything illustrates the pitfalls of well-intended
meddling, it's Panama, not the much-maligned War on Poverty.
Clearly, the aim was not to promote the cocaine trade or reduce
Panama from a mere banana republic to the status of
international basket case, yet that's what we seem to have
accomplished. Before pulling the trigger on Saddam Hussein,
shouldn't we reflect, as true conservatives surely would want
us to, on the dangerous arrogance of all human schemes and
designs? Shouldn't we tally up the entirely possible and
thoroughly unintended consequences of a war in the gulf? An
ever deeper recession, for example, a wave of anti-American
terrorism, a devastating attack on Israel?

    The second lesson is that however noble the ends, the use
of force always entails one tragic and, realistically speaking,
intended consequence, and that is the loss of lives. Maybe, if
President Bush ever overcomes his obsession with Saddam, he
might think about how to repay the estimated $1 billion in
damage caused by his invasion of Panama. But the dead, whether
they number in the thousands or "only" hundreds, will not wake
up to see that happy day. Nor will the tens of thousands who
may die in a gulf war -- Americans, Iraqis and others -- ever
stir again once the tanks have rolled away across the sand.

    Before he orders another shot fired, George Bush ought to
stop and count very slowly to 10 because, as everyone fears,
we may be wading into a Vietnam. Or what could be in the long
term just about as bad -- another Panama.