Essay: Speak Softly and Carry a Cage

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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.