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Thus the furor in Washington last week seemed out of proportion to the canal's importance to the U.S. Some in Washington seem more interested in keeping the U.S. Southern Command in Panama after 1999, but like the canal, that may be a misplaced concern. Panama provides an important and secure base for U.S. intelligence gathering in the region, but many of those activities could be moved elsewhere. Moreover, with rapid-deployment units in California and the South, potential Latin American hot spots can easily be covered from the U.S.
A more convincing case for why Americans should care about Noriega is Bush's assertion that the U.S. is "committed to democracy in Panama." But the lack of a democracy in, say, Saudi Arabia or, closer to home, in Guatemala, where a President rules at the suffrage of an edgy military, fails to excite Washington. "As long as we thought Noriega was our kind of guy, we didn't care about democracy in Panama," says Wayne Smith, a professor of Latin American studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. "We put emphasis on democracy when it suits our purposes."
The Reagan Administration was responsible for redefining the U.S. purpose in Panama -- and then turning up the noise level. Noriega drew Washington's wrath by becoming an embarrassment on two policy fronts. At a time when the U.S. was proclaiming a war on drugs, it was difficult to justify consorting with a dictator who not only personally profited from the drug traffic but also put his country's resources at the narcotraficantes' disposal. Moreover, as democracy became the Administration's watchword, dealings with Panama's dictator rendered Reagan's denunciations of Nicaragua's "dictator in designer glasses" patently hypocritical. Noriega, the White House proclaimed, had to go.
But Noriega refused to go, and Washington's campaign to unseat him eventually deteriorated into a pathetic exercise geared as much to saving U.S. prestige as to making Panama safe for democracy. Even if Bush would like to ignore Noriega, he cannot, because the adversarial relationship has been established. "His Administration inherited an absolute fouled-up mess," says Moss. Beyond frustrated aims, the Bush Administration was left to grapple with the ongoing embarrassment of having the leader of the free world thwarted by a two-bit despot. "Noriega has made us look bad," says Richard Millett, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. "He's humiliated us in front of the world, something that has not done much for our credibility."
Given the past fury of the confrontation, Bush should be commended for the restraint he displayed last week. Instead of signing on to the hotheaded clash between the U.S. and the Panamanian commanders in chief favored by the Reagan White House, Bush redrew the battle lines. He described the crisis in Panama as "a conflict between Noriega and the people of Panama." He cast the U.S. in a supporting role, seconding the calls of Latin American leaders for Noriega "to heed the will of the people of Panama." That puts the Panamanian people at the center of their country's drama, where they belong, with Latin Americans hovering closest and the U.S. standing by to provide support.