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So many years and wars later, it’s easy to forget
what a total television hit the first Gulf War of 1991 was. Just in case
you no longer remember -- and why should you? -- that was the war that was to
bury America’s defeat in Vietnam forever and signal the arrival of the greatest
Great Power the planet had ever known, the soon-to-be-Soviet-Union-less United
States. That first partial invasion of Iraq, with its million or more
uniformed extras, its vast sets, and its six-month preproduction schedule
filled with logistical miracles, was something to behold. All through the
winter of 1990, the production had its built-in “coming attractions,” the many
variations on “showdown in the Gulf” with Saddam Hussein, the glowering guy
with the black mustache who had, until more or less the previous night, been
Washington’s man in Baghdad.
Those previews of the war-to-come teased American
viewers with a possible January opening in domestic multiplexes
nationwide. And when it arrived, the production didn’t disappoint.
It had its dazzling Star Wars-style graphics, its own theme music
and logos, and its stunningly prime-timed first moments (Disneyesque fireworks
over Baghdad). As a show, it was calibrated for controlled thrills,
anxiety, and relief from its opening laser-guided, son et lumière spectacular
to its final triumphant helicopter descent on the U.S. embassy in Kuwait (which
was meant to replay in reverse indelible final images of helicopters fleeing Saigon).
And what a show that war was, a kind of
program-length commercial similar to those pioneered by toy companies in the
previous decade that had turned TV cartoons into animated toy catalogs.
It was as if the whole post-Vietnam era had been building toward nothing but
that 43-day-long ad, intent on selling domestic and foreign markets on the
renewal of American power as well as on the specific weapons systems that were
renewing that power. In this way, the Gulf War of 1991 hawked the
leading-edge aspects of the country’s two foremost exports: arms and
entertainment.
Almost a quarter of a century later, amid the rubble
of a chaotic Greater Middle East, America’s third Iraq war drags on, as
Washington officials insist that it has years still to go. Meanwhile,
Iraq itself, having experienced two American invasions, a prolonged occupation,
and an era of “reconstruction” (which proved to be largely an era of
deconstruction), as well as the birth of a jihadist oil-mini-state in its
midst, now threatens to split into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish
cantonments. Given what’s happened in the 24 years since, who now
remembers any of the triumphalist glories of that first conflict in the
Gulf? And here’s a guarantee: no matter how few still remember the
highlight reels from that moment, even fewer remember the American war that, in
a sense, began it all, the one that TomDispatch regular Greg Grandin, author of The
Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, recalls today: the
invasion of Panama. Tom
The
War to Start All Wars. The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama.
By Greg
Grandin
As we end another year of endless war in Washington,
it might be the perfect time to reflect on the War That Started All Wars -- or
at least the war that started all of Washington’s post-Cold War wars: the
invasion of Panama.
Twenty-five years ago this month, early on the
morning of December 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation
Just Cause, sending tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of aircraft into
Panama to execute a warrant of arrest against its leader, Manuel Noriega, on
charges of drug trafficking. Those troops quickly secured all important
strategic installations, including the main airport in Panama City, various
military bases, and ports. Noriega went into hiding before surrendering on
January 3rd and was then officially extradited to the United States to stand
trial. Soon after, most of the U.S. invaders withdrew from the country.
In and out. Fast and simple. An entrance plan and an
exit strategy all wrapped in one. And it worked, making Operation Just Cause
one of the most successful military actions in U.S. history. At least in
tactical terms.
There were casualties. More than 20 U.S. soldiers
were killed and 300-500 Panamanian combatants died as well. Disagreement
exists over how many civilians perished. Washington claimed that few
died. In the “low hundreds,” the Pentagon’s Southern Command said. But others charged that U.S. officials didn’t
bother to count the dead in El Chorrillo, a poor Panama City barrio that
U.S. planes indiscriminately bombed because it was thought to be a bastion of support for Noriega. Grassroots
human-rights organizations claimed thousands of civilians were killed and tens of
thousands displaced.
As Human Rights Watch wrote, even conservative estimates of civilian fatalities suggested “that the
rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civilians… were not
faithfully observed by the invading U.S. forces.” That may have been putting it
mildly when it came to the indiscriminant bombing of a civilian population, but
the point at least was made. Civilians were given no notice. The Cobra and
Apache helicopters that came over the ridge didn’t bother to announce their
pending arrival by blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (as in Apocalypse
Now). The University of Panama’s seismograph marked 442 major explosions in the first 12 hours of the invasion,
about one major bomb blast every two minutes. Fires engulfed the mostly wooden
homes, destroying about 4,000 residences. Some residents began to call
El Chorrillo “Guernica” or “little Hiroshima.” Shortly after hostilities ended,
bulldozers excavated mass graves and shoveled in the bodies. “Buried like dogs,”
said
the mother of one of the civilian dead.
Sandwiched between the fall of the Berlin Wall on
November 9, 1989, and the commencement of the first Gulf War on January 17,
1991, Operation Just Cause might seem a curio from a nearly forgotten era, its
anniversary hardly worth a mention. So many earth-shattering events have
happened since. But the invasion of Panama should be remembered in a big
way. After all, it helps explain many of those events. In fact, you can’t
begin to fully grasp the slippery slope of American militarism in the post-9/11
era -- how unilateral, preemptory “regime change” became an acceptable foreign
policy option, how “democracy promotion” became a staple of defense strategy,
and how war became a branded public spectacle -- without understanding Panama.
Our
Man in Panama
Operation Just Cause was carried out unilaterally, sanctioned neither by the United Nations nor the
Organization of American States (OAS). In addition, the invasion was the
first post-Cold War military operation justified in the name of democracy -- “militant
democracy,” as George Will approvingly called what the Pentagon would unilaterally install in
Panama.
The campaign to capture Noriega, however, didn’t
start with such grand ambitions. For years, as Saddam Hussein had been
Washington’s man in Iraq, so Noriega was a CIA asset and Washington ally in
Panama. He was a key player in the shadowy network of
anti-communists, tyrants, and drug runners that made up what would become Iran-Contra. That, in case you’ve forgotten, was a
conspiracy involving President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council to sell high-tech
missiles to the Ayatollahs in Iran and then divert their payments to support
anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua in order to destabilize the Sandinista
government there. Noriega’s usefulness to Washington came to an end in 1986,
after journalist Seymour Hersh published an investigation in the New York Times
linking him to drug trafficking. It turned out that the Panamanian autocrat had
been working both sides. He was “our man,” but apparently was also passing on intelligence
about us to Cuba.
Still, when George H.W. Bush was inaugurated president in
January 1989, Panama was not high on his foreign policy agenda. Referring to
the process by which Noriega, in less than a year, would become America’s most
wanted autocrat, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft said: “I can’t really describe the course of events that
led us this way... Noriega, was he running drugs and stuff? Sure, but so were a
lot of other people. Was he thumbing his nose at the United States? Yeah, yeah.”
The
Keystone Kops...
Domestic politics provided the tipping point to
military action. For most of 1989, Bush administration officials had been
half-heartedly calling for a coup against Noriega. Still, they were caught
completely caught off guard when, in October, just such a coup started
unfolding. The White House was, at that moment, remarkably in the dark. It had
no clear intel about what was actually happening. “All of us agreed at that
point that we simply had very little to go on,” Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney later reported. “There was a lot of confusion at the time because
there was a lot of confusion in Panama.”
“We were sort of the Keystone Kops,” was the way
Scowcroft remembered it, not knowing what to do or whom to support.
When Noriega regained the upper hand, Bush came under intense criticism in
Congress and the media. This, in turn, spurred him to act. Scowcroft recalls
the momentum that led to the invasion: “Maybe we were looking for an
opportunity to show that we were not as messed up as the Congress kept saying
we were, or as timid as a number of people said.” The administration had to
find a way to respond, as Scowcroft put it, to the “whole wimp factor.”
Momentum built for action, and so did the pressure to
find a suitable justification for action after the fact. Shortly after the
failed coup, Cheney claimed on PBS’s Newshour that the only
objectives the U.S. had in Panama were to “safeguard American lives” and “protect
American interests” by defending that crucial passageway from the Atlantic to
the Pacific Oceans, the Panama Canal. “We are not there,” he emphasized, “to
remake the Panamanian government.” He also noted that the White House had no
plans to act unilaterally against the wishes of the Organization of American
States to extract Noriega from the country. The “hue and cry and the outrage
that we would hear from one end of the hemisphere to the other,” he said, “…raises
serious doubts about the course of that action.”
That was mid-October. What a difference two months
would make. By December 20th, the campaign against Noriega had gone from
accidental -- Keystone Kops bumbling in the dark -- to transformative: the Bush
administration would end up remaking the Panamanian government and, in the
process, international law.
...Start
a Wild Fire
Cheney wasn’t wrong about the “hue and cry.” Every
single country other than the United States in the Organization of American
States voted against the invasion of Panama, but by then it couldn’t have
mattered less. Bush acted anyway.
What changed everything was the fall of the Berlin
Wall just over a month before the invasion. Paradoxically, as the Soviet Union’s
influence in its backyard (eastern Europe) unraveled, it left Washington
with more room to maneuver in its backyard (Latin America). The collapse of
Soviet-style Communism also gave the White House an opportunity to go on the
ideological and moral offense. And at that moment, the invasion of Panama
happened to stand at the head of the line.
As with most military actions, the invaders had a
number of justifications to offer, but at that moment the goal of installing a “democratic”
regime in power suddenly flipped to the top of the list. In adopting that
rationale for making war, Washington was in effect radically revising the terms
of international diplomacy. At the heart of its argument was the idea that
democracy (as defined by the Bush administration) trumped the principle of
national sovereignty.
Latin American nations immediately recognized the threat.
After all, according to historian John Coatsworth, the U.S. overthrew 41
governments in Latin America between 1898 and 1994, and many of those regime
changes were ostensibly carried out, as Woodrow Wilson once put it in reference
to Mexico, to teach Latin Americans “to elect good men.” Their resistance only gave Bush’s ambassador to the OAS,
Luigi Einaudi, a chance to up the ethical ante. He quickly and explicitly tied
the assault on Panama to the wave of democracy movements then sweeping Eastern
Europe. “Today we are... living in historic times,” he lectured his fellow OAS delegates, two days after the invasion, “a
time when a great principle is spreading across the world like wildfire. That
principle, as we all know, is the revolutionary idea that people, not
governments, are sovereign.”
Einaudi’s remarks hit on all the points that would
become so familiar early in the next century in George W. Bush’s “Freedom
Agenda”: the idea that democracy, as defined by Washington, was a universal
value; that “history” represented a movement toward the fulfillment of that
value; and that any nation or person who stood in the path of such fulfillment
would be swept away.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Einaudi said,
democracy had acquired the “force of historical necessity.” It went without
saying that the United States, within a year the official victor in the Cold
War and the “sole superpower” left on Planet Earth, would be the executor of
that necessity. Bush’s ambassador reminded his fellow delegates that the “great
democratic tide which is now sweeping the globe” had actually started in Latin
America, with human rights movements working to end abuses by military juntas
and dictators. The fact that Latin American’s freedom fighters had
largely been fighting against U.S.-backed anti-communist rightwing death-squad
states was lost on the ambassador.
In the case of Panama, “democracy” quickly worked its
way up the shortlist of casus belli.
In his December 20th address to the nation announcing
the invasion, President Bush gave “democracy” as his second reason for going to
war, just behind safeguarding American lives but ahead of combatting drug
trafficking or protecting the Panama Canal. By the next day, at a press
conference, democracy had leapt to the top of the list and so the president began
his opening remarks this way: “Our efforts to support the democratic processes
in Panama and to ensure continued safety of American citizens is now moving
into its second day.”
George Will, the conservative pundit, was quick to
realize the significance of this new post-Cold War rationale for military
action. In a syndicated column headlined, “Drugs and Canal Are Secondary: Restoring Democracy Was Reason
Enough to Act,” he praised the invasion for “stressing… the restoration of
democracy,” adding that, by doing so, “the president put himself squarely in a
tradition with a distinguished pedigree. It holds that America’s fundamental
national interest is to be America, and the nation’s identity (its sense of its
self, its peculiar purposefulness) is inseparable from a commitment to the
spread -- not the aggressive universalization, but the civilized advancement --
of the proposition to which we, unique among nations, are, as the greatest
American said, dedicated.”
That was fast. From Keystone Kops to Thomas Paine in
just two months, as the White House seized the moment to radically revise the
terms by which the U.S. engaged the world. In so doing, it overthrew not just
Manuel Noriega but what, for half a century, had been the bedrock foundation of
the liberal multilateral order: the ideal of national sovereignty.
Darkness
Unto Light
The way the invasion was reported represented a
qualitative leap in scale, intensity, and visibility when compared to past
military actions. Think of the illegal bombing of Cambodia ordered by Richard
Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1969 and conducted
for more than five years in complete secrecy, or of the time lag between actual
fighting in South Vietnam and the moment, often a day later, when it was
reported.
In contrast, the war in Panama was covered with a
you-are-there immediacy, a remarkable burst of shock-and-awe journalism (before
the phrase “shock and awe” was even invented) meant to capture and keep the
public’s attention. Operation Just Cause was “one of the shortest armed
conflicts in American military history,” writes Brigadier General John Brown, a historian at the
United States Army Center of Military History. It was also “extraordinarily
complex, involving the deployment of thousands of personnel and equipment from
distant military installations and striking almost two-dozen objectives within
a 24-hour period of time… Just Cause represented a bold new era in American
military force projection: speed, mass, and precision, coupled with immediate
public visibility.”
Well, a certain kind of visibility at least. The
devastation of El Chorrillo was, of course, ignored by the U.S. media.
In this sense, the invasion of Panama was the
forgotten warm-up for the first Gulf War, which took place a little over a year
later. That assault was specifically designed for all the world to see. “Smart
bombs” lit up the sky over Baghdad as the TV cameras rolled. Featured were new
night-vision equipment, real-time satellite communications, and cable TV (as
well as former U.S. commanders ready to narrate the war in the style of
football announcers, right down to instant replays). All of this allowed for
public consumption of a techno-display of apparent omnipotence that, at least
for a short time, helped consolidate mass approval and was meant as both a
lesson and a warning for the rest of the world. “By God,” Bush said in triumph,
“we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
It was a heady form of triumphalism that would teach
those in Washington exactly the wrong lessons about war and the world.
Justice
Is Our Brand
In the mythology of American militarism that has
taken hold since George W. Bush’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his
father, George H.W. Bush, is often held up as a paragon of prudence --
especially when compared to the later reckless lunacy of Vice President Dick
Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz. After all, their agenda held that it was the messianic duty of
the United States to rid the world not just of “evil-doers”
but “evil” itself. In contrast, Bush Senior, we are told, recognized the limits of American power. He was
a realist and his circumscribed Gulf War was a “war of necessity” where his son’s
2003 invasion of Iraq was a catastrophic “war of choice.” But it was H.W. who
first rolled out a “freedom agenda” to legitimize the illegal invasion of
Panama.
Likewise, the moderation of George W. Bush’s
Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell, has often been contrasted favorably with
the rashness of the neocons in the post-9/11 years. As the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, however, Powell was hot for getting Noriega. In
discussions leading up to the invasion, he advocated forcefully for military
action, believing it offered an opportunity to try out what would later become
known as “the Powell Doctrine.” Meant to ensure that there would never again be
another Vietnam or any kind of American military defeat, that doctrine was to
rely on a set of test questions for any potential operation involving ground
troops that would limit military operations to defined objectives. Among them
were: Is the action in response to a direct threat to national security? Do we
have a clear goal? Is there an exit strategy?
It was Powell who first let the new style of American
war go to his head and pushed for a more exalted name to brand the war with,
one that undermined the very idea of those “limits” he was theoretically trying
to establish. Following Pentagon practice, the operational plan to capture
Noriega was to go by the meaningless name of “Blue Spoon.” That, Powell wrote in My American Journey, was “hardly a rousing
call to arms… [So] we kicked around a number of ideas and finally settled on...
Just Cause. Along with the inspirational ring, I liked something else about it.
Even our severest critics would have to utter ‘Just Cause’ while denouncing us.”
Since the pursuit of justice is infinite, it’s hard
to see what your exit strategy is once you claim it as your “cause.” Remember,
George W. Bush’s original name for his Global War on Terror was to be the
less-than-modest Operation Infinite Justice.
Powell says he hesitated on the eve of the invasion, wondering if
it really was the best course of action, but let out a “whoop and a holler”
when he learned that Noriega had been found. A new Panamanian president had
already been sworn in at Fort Clayton, a U.S. military base in the
Canal Zone, hours before the invasion began.
Here’s the lesson Powell took
from Panama: the invasion, he wrote, confirmed all his “convictions over the
preceding twenty years, since the days of doubt over Vietnam. Have a clear
political objective and stick to it. Use all the force necessary, and do not
apologize for going in big if that is what it takes... As I write these words,
almost six years after Just Cause, Mr. Noriega, convicted on the drug charges
contained in the indictments, sits in an American prison cell. Panama has a new
security force, and the country is still a democracy.”
That assessment was made in 1995. From a later
vantage point, history’s judgment is not so sanguine. As George H.W. Bush’s
ambassador to the United Nations, Thomas Pickering said
about Operation Just Cause: “Having used force in Panama... there was a
propensity in Washington to think that force could provide a result more
rapidly, more effectively, more surgically than diplomacy.” The easy capture of
Noriega meant “the notion that the international community had to be engaged...
was ignored.”
“Iraq in 2003 was all of that shortsightedness in
spades,” Pickering said. “We were going to do it all ourselves.” And we did.
The road to Baghdad, in other
words, ran through Panama City. It was George H.W. Bush’s invasion of
that small, poor country 25 years ago that inaugurated the age of preemptive
unilateralism, using “democracy” and “freedom” as both justifications for war
and a branding opportunity. Later, after 9/11, when George W. insisted that the ideal of
national sovereignty was a thing of the past, when he said nothing -- certainly
not the opinion of the international community -- could stand in the way of the
“great mission” of the United States to “extend the benefits of freedom across
the globe,” all he was doing was throwing more fuel on the “wildfire” sparked
by his father. A wildfire some in Panama likened to a “little Hiroshima.”
Greg Grandin, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of a number of books
including, most recently, The
Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which was a
finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize, was anointed by Fresh Air’s
Maureen Corrigan as the best book of the year, and was also on the “best
of” lists of the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the Financial
Times. He blogs for the Nation magazine and teaches
at New York University.
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