TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012290/0122005.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 4.0 KB | 86 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 41

AMERICA ABROAD

Operation Mismatch


By Strobe Talbott


    It is only natural that a red-blooded American who has
repeatedly been called a wimp should derive a certain
satisfaction from the sudden accusation that he is actually a
bully. Hence the strutting, how-do-you-like-them-apples?
comments coming from the White House just after the invasion
of Panama.

    But the Bush Administration soon adopted a more seemly tone
-- restrained, conciliatory, even a tad remorseful about the
earlier chest pounding. Legal experts warned that official
American name calling might jeopardize the prosecution's case
against Manuel Noriega. But there was another reason for George
Bush's eagerness to put away the big stick and start talking
softly again. He believes in that AT&T advertising slogan,
"Reach out and touch someone" -- not with the 82nd Airborne but
with a telephone call. Starting in the early hours of Operation
Just Cause, he talked to more than a dozen foreign leaders,
many of them in Latin America. They were polite, in some cases
even supportive, but in virtually all cases cautionary. Here
was the U.S. occupying a neighboring country just when the
Soviet Union finally seemed to be getting out of that business.
The Kremlin did some remonstrating of its own. At their Malta
meeting, Mikhail Gorbachev had complained to Bush about the
U.S.'s military muscle flexing during the attempted coup in the
Philippines; now here was Uncle Sam in Panama, again seeming
to relegitimize the use of force.

    Then there was another awkward feature of the operation:
maybe it was a just cause, but it was hardly a fair fight. The
ratio of the U.S.'s population to Panama's is 100 to 1. Factor
in the overwhelming superiority of the American military, and
it might as well be 1,000 to 1. Similar odds prevailed during
Ronald Reagan's conquest of Grenada in 1983 and his
eleven-minutes-over-Libya bombing raid against Muammar Gaddafi
in 1986. A none-too-edifying pattern is emerging in the late
20th century. Since conflicts between nuclear-armed big boys may
lead to Armageddon, being a superpower has come to mean
roaring at mice -- picking on someone emphatically not your own
size. Presidents claim, and usually get, domestic credit for
standing tall against pygmies. But they cannot expect
enthusiastic cheers from the rest of the world.

    Bush was receptive to the overseas reaction. In general, he
is a good listener, unusually so for a politician. He is also
very much a foreign policy President. He savors and nurtures
his personal relationships with other leaders. A number of
those he consulted said that whatever the provocation and even
justification for attacking Panama, there would be a price to
pay abroad. That message meant at least as much to Bush as the
gloating of his political advisers over the payoff at home. To
his credit, he seemed genuinely embarrassed when the bumptious
Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater rushed to
treat Noriega like Willie Horton, the murderer and rapist whose
mug shot figured so prominently in the 1988 campaign -- a bad
guy that good Americans love to hate.

    Last week, when planeloads of U.S. soldiers began returning
from Panama, Bush and his top aides were clearly relieved. They
realized that getting out was every bit as important as going
in. The spin from the White House and the State Department was
all in the direction of disclaimers. No, the invasion was not
a precedent. No, it did not represent a "Bush Doctrine,"
whereby the President reserves the right to send in a
9,500-member SWAT team to arrest an entire country. Instead, the
Panama invasion was a last resort, an exception that will, over
time, prove the rule of America's respect for diplomacy and law.
That is the best that can be said for the episode, and it is
the most that the Administration ought to claim.