Speak Softly and Carry a Cage

By Michael Kinsley

By this my sword that conquered Persia,

! Thy fall shall make me famous through the world.

I will not tell thee how I'll handle thee,

But every common soldier of my camp

Shall smile to see thy miserable state.

Thus says the socially insecure world conqueror Tamburlaine, in Christopher Marlowe's play of the same name, to Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks. Tamburlaine puts the defeated Emperor in a cage and has him wheeled around to subsequent battle sites. Quite a comedown for the Emperor. And quite an ego boost for Tamburlaine, the former shepherd.

Manuel Antonio Noriega is hardly the Emperor of the Turks. But seizing Noriega and bringing him back to the U.S. in chains is a similar callow triumphalist flourish by President George Bush, the former wimp. Modern media saved Bush the necessity of lugging Noriega in a cage to future summits and election rallies. That prison mug shot of the humiliated former dictator became an instant worldwide image.

No one would accuse Bush of invading Panama merely to prove his manhood. (Although after Grenada, the Falklands and now this, an early mini-war is probably turning into a standard expectation for future Western leaders.) In fact, it is hard to quarrel with the invasion's success.

True, the ostensible reasons for the invasion were mostly phony: there was no danger to the canal; the White House itself had originally laughed off Noriega's "declaration of war"; Bush's flowery defense of American womanhood, based on a single murky episode of rude remarks, belongs in an operetta. True, Noriega's thuggery and drug connections didn't much bother anyone in the White House until Michael Dukakis (remember him?) decided to make an issue of them in 1988. True, the invasion will have no impact on the drug war anyway. True, there were less bloody ways to remove Noriega, before and since. True, the only legitimate reason for the invasion -- establishing democracy -- is not one America is prepared to apply routinely.

All true, but so what? By all reports, the Panamanians themselves are pleased. If democracy really does stick in Panama, and if the economy we ruined is expeditiously rebuilt, the invasion will have been worthwhile.

The rest of the world, though, could be forgiven for suspecting that concern for the welfare of Panamanians weighed lightly in America's thinking about the invasion. The lack of interest, for example, in the Panamanian civilian death count has been shocking. The New York Times and Washington Post ran hundreds ^ of articles on aspects of the invasion. You would have thought that even the fact of uncertainty and confusion about the numbers, which were known to be in the hundreds, would be worth an article or two. But the first article addressing itself primarily to civilian casualties appeared on page 23 of the Post 17 days after the invasion.

U.S. officials announced Jan. 9 that 220 "unarmed civilians not involved in fighting and street disorders" had been killed in violence "directly related" to the invasion -- an ominously qualified statistic. But even that number, which has been challenged, is proportionally equivalent to 22,000 Americans. Add 314 Panamanian troops, and Panama's loss in a couple of days is equivalent to America's during the entire Viet Nam War. Yet compare the American press's indifference to Panamanian deaths with its lavish emphasis on -- and, it seems, exaggeration of -- the death count in Rumania.

Carting Noriega off for trial in America is another insult to Panama, and a mockery of the notions of justice it is intended to celebrate. After all, his crimes against the U.S. are pretty trivial compared with his crimes against his own country. It doesn't really blunt the insult that the Panamanians are happy enough to see him go, and offered him up to us as a sort of reward.

Lacking the courage of our own imperialism, we are now going to twist our justice system to make a trial of this petty foreign dictator, whose country we invaded to grab him, fit into conventional criminal procedure. Did I say "grab him"? Not at all. For legal reasons, the Government preposterously insists that he "surrendered voluntarily." Conservatives are already complaining that civil liberties may let Noriega off the hook -- as if the difficulty of giving a fair trial to a man America went to war against proves that America's fair-trial standards are too stringent.

Meanwhile, little is heard from an area of law you might think was more relevant: international law. Unlike Ronald Reagan before the invasion of Grenada, Bush didn't even bother to find some Organization of Insignificant Nearby Countries to smoke an invitation out of. This time around, U.S. officials can barely be troubled to invoke their one-size-fits-all interpretation of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which refers to the right of national self-defense.

Bush himself was quick to apologize when overenthusiastic American troops raided the Nicaraguan embassy in Panama City. The sanctity of embassies is a bit of international law important to the U.S. Yet it seems like misplaced fastidiousness to worry about the sovereignty of nations' embassies when you so clearly don't worry about the sovereignty of nations.

Among Noriega's other available defenses is one of selective prosecution. Is the U.S. now going to hold legally liable every foreign head of state whose malefactions hurt Americans? Surely not, as Administration officials have been at pains to make clear in recent days. Seizing and trying Noriega reflects two contradictory kinds of American posturing: bullying and faux-naivete (we don't really invade countries; we just enforce the law). If the Panamanians didn't want him, he should have been allowed to rot in the resort of his choice, like other former American friends.