American intervention in Panama - 22 December 1989

I sense that the White House and General Powell, the chief of staff, and Mr Cheney, the secretary of defence, must all have felt horror, of course, over the Bucharest Massacre, but also a little guilty relief that a big, dreadful story of domination and dictatorship elsewhere had pushed the Panama invasion into second place.

For it's become painfully obvious already, that the invasion has not gone according to plan.

If a military adventure of any length had been anticipated, it would surely have been mounted after the Christmas holidays. The president, in fact, had planned a jolly little ceremony at the White House on Thursday evening to celebrate the arrival of peace on earth and goodwill to men. The president's family was to be at his side and a Santa Claus was to hand out presents to the White House staff.

The president held to the plan anyway. The family and the jolly old giant were all there and the president was described as being in a confident, almost a giddy, mood. His only complaint was about a pain in the neck, and he was talking literally, not about the missing monster, General Noriega.

On Wednesday, there were two small, interesting signs that the invasion was expected to be as swift and, as they say, as surgical as President Reagan's swoop on Grenada. The United States attorney general's office in Florida, in Miami, switched its light on at five in the morning.

The justice department's man was awake and on hand, with all the necessary papers, to receive the captured Noriega and present him formally with the government's charges of massive drug trafficking and money laundering on which he would then be brought to trial. Need I say that the culprit failed to show up?

Three hours later, at 8am, President Bush took to television for a short, measured statement. It was originally meant to be a modest declaration of victory. But its tenses had to be changed. It turned into a statement that the operation was underway and it implied what, a day later, was asserted by General Powell that Panama City was securely held and that mopping-up operations in the outlying districts were well under way.

By Thursday night, the secretary of defence was asked when the trouble might be all over. By Christmas? New Year, perhaps? "Well," he said, "say a week or two. Perhaps". On Friday, with the oddly-named Dignity soldiers still unsubdued and remnants of the Panamanian defence force stubbornly at large and fighting, and widespread looting having taken over Panama City, the 3,000 or more American military police who were meant to go in to maintain order after the battles were over, they were already in there, or on their way to handle a situation in the city itself which even a Pentagon official called "chaotic".

Now, at the very beginning, way back there last Wednesday dawn and, whatever the White House said, the measure of the invasion's success was taken by most Americans to be the capture of General Noriega. The response of the American press and an overwhelming majority of the American people, more than 90% of them, was strong approval of the president's move on the grounds, we ought to note, that Noriega had insulted and mocked the United States, killed a marine officer, sexually threatened an American wife and, all in all, given the president ample cause to say "enough is enough".

These are not very firm diplomatic or legal grounds for the invasion of any country. But, for the time being, and in the expectation that the monster of the Caribbean would be caught, they were enough.

At the start of the adventure, the White House and the state department and the Pentagon, certainly had queasy feelings about how it would all look to America's allies in Central and South America, especially the countries allied in one of those regional associations, the United Nations permits, in the OAS, the Organisation of American States.

But the president assured us that he and his advisors had been in touch with them and they were sympathetic. It took less than 24 hours for us to realise that the state department specialists on the Central and South American desks were victims of wishful thinking.

Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico all condemned the invasion as illegal interference in the sovereign affairs of a fellow American nation. Peru recalled its ambassador from Washington, Venezuela announced that it would not recognise the government of Mr Endara, installed by the United States, until American troops were withdrawn. Public rallies of protest were organised in Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay.

The United Nations Security Council was called in to emergency session at the behest, of course, of Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, who must have seized on the invasion as a God-sent proof of his contention that the United States is still the old colonial bully and the colossus of the north.

At that session, even France would not approve or explicitly condemn. Only Britain and Canada voiced their support. And while the UN Security Council was fussing about which Panamanian delegate should represent the country, Noriega's men or Mr Endara's, the Organisation of American States met and delivered a nasty blow to the American action by actually seating the representative of General Noriega, a man they all thoroughly loathed. And, on Friday morning, they voted 20-1 to deplore the American invasion.

So, by the third day of the invasion, Mr Bush could count, among all this allies and official friends, only one positively enthusiastic voice of approval, the voice of Mrs Thatcher.

"How about", a well-read person asked me, "former President Carter?" who was the chief of the neutral observers at the recent Panamanian election which provided such an overwhelming majority for Mr Endara and his two running mates.

Mr Carter testified that the popular majority was about 3-1 and that when General Noriega heard the result, he promptly tore up the ballot boxes, burned mountains of others, sent out his soldiers to polling stations and declared the election null and void.

Mr Carter was a great help to the Bush administration with this report on Noriega's fraudulence and he gave the administration the strongest motive for declaring Noriega to be beyond all negotiation or ousting by peaceful means.

Now this brings up the actual legal grounds on which the invasion was undertaken and Mr Bush announced these grounds in the same breath as he reported the military operations by 24,000 men. And I believe it is the legal pretext that, in the long run, will come to justify or discredit the invasion.

Well, over the weekend, before the action itself, the attorney general was busy establishing the authority under international law that would sanction it. He did find two justifying laws. One, article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which recognises "the inherent right of nations to act in self-defence".

The other, is article 21 of the Charter of the OAS, the Organisation of American States, which prohibits the use of military force "except in cases of self-defence in accordance with existing treaties". The UN article is obviously weak but the OAS article must have seemed to the administration the firmer ground because "in accordance with existing treaties" could be made to apply to the 1979 treaty with Panama which President Carter, over the very vocal opposition of one Ronald Reagan, negotiated.

It passes over to Panama in 2000AD the ownership and operation of the Panama Canal but it reserves to the United States, both before and after that time, the right to move in, to protect any threat to the operation of the canal.

So, now, without much fiddling, the Bush administration was able to cite very strong grounds, legally protected, it believes, for the invasion. General Noriega has said, only a week or so ago, that a state of war exists between Panama and the United States which could fairly be taken as a threat to the canal.

Strangely, even the serious American press failed to use the state of war-canal threat as the justifying provocation. Everybody seemed to respond to Noriega's mockery and to a justifiable wish, on America's part, to – as the president put it – restore democracy to Panama.

The phrase has been parroted by commentators good and bad but, so far, I've not heard anybody remark that Panama has never been a democracy. The prospect of assisting at the birth of it is there in the installation of Mr Endara and his two vice presidents but Panama is the creation of the United States, after the US grabbed it from Colombia.

It has been America's creature ever since and its leaders, dictators mostly, have stayed in power at Washington's pleasure. Until three years ago, Noriega himself, was a cherished employee at $200,000 a year of American intelligence in its early battles with the Colombian drug cartel. When it appeared that the general was, in fact, the prime agent and protector of the cartel itself, he was revealed and execrated as the monster he is. And Washington has been trying and failing to get rid of him ever since.

So, Jimmy Carter. Alas, this time, he's no help. He points out that the OAS clause which might justify military action in accordance with existing treaties, that is, the protection of the canal, is, and I quote him, "undercut by article 15 in the same document which says no state or group of states has the right to intervene directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of other states".

Well, all this legal boosting means at the moment very little to the American people. Their test of whether the invasion was right or wrong will be, I suspect, simpler and more brutal.

As with the helicopter raid in Tehran, the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Grenada, the test – which the administration is all too nervously aware of – is did it work? And quickly?

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