Kissinger’s Shadow (24 page)

Just a decade out of Vietnam, the United States wasn't yet willing to make a serious military commitment in the Middle East. But there was a place where it could take one of those “tougher stands in order to make others believe in us again,” as Kissinger, earlier, had advised was necessary in the wake of Vietnam. Two days after the Beirut bombing, Reagan ordered US troops to invade Grenada, a small Caribbean island just off the coast of Venezuela. It was billed as a rescue mission, as the
Mayaguez
raid was eight years earlier, this time to save a few hundred US citizens, mostly medical students, from fighting that had broken out on the island between political factions (though the chancellor of St. George Medical College said the students were never in any danger).

The reaction to the invasion, by the press and politicians, was schizophrenic. On the one hand, there was a sense it was nothing but choreographed spectacle (the invasion, said one columnist, gave “American television” one of its “better weeks”) meant to distract from the carnage in Beirut, a war, one Democratic senator remarked, that the US “could win.”
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There was something ludicrous about the operation, dubbed “Urgent Fury,” which resulted in the granting of “8,612 medals to individual Americans” although there had never been more than “7,000 officers and enlisted soldiers on the island.”
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On the other hand, the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, after some initial criticism, rallied around the president. The Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, called the invasion “justified,” as did Representative Thomas Foley. “Years of frustration were vented by the Grenada invasion,” said New Jersey Democrat Robert Torricelli, who suggested the triumph helped overcome not just Vietnam but the humiliation of the prolonged 1979–81 Iranian hostage crisis.
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“Our days of weakness are over,” Reagan said about America's ability to commandeer this small 130-square mile Caribbean island of less than 100,000 people. According to the official US count, 45 Grenadians, 24 Cubans, and 19 Americans died in the assault. “Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall,” said Reagan.
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PANAMA

Six years later, Kissinger endorsed George H. W. Bush's December 1989 invasion of Panama. Operation Just Cause—the name given to the invasion of Panama and the capture and removal to the United States of its leader, Manuel Noriega—was a quick, now nearly forgotten war sandwiched between the momentous fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequential first Gulf War. But it was extremely significant since it was the first post–Cold War military operation carried out with the goal of restoring another country's democracy and thus represented a substantial expansion of what constituted a legitimate excuse for going to war.

The campaign didn't start out with such ambitions. For years Noriega had been a CIA asset and Washington ally. That began to change in the last years of the Reagan administration, after Seymour Hersh in 1986 published an investigation in the
New York Times
linking Noriega to drug trafficking. It still would be months before the press would break Iran-Contra, but Noriega was deeply enmeshed in the networks involved in that conspiracy, in money laundering, gunrunning, drug trafficking, and intelligence sharing. He worked both sides. He was “our man,” as one US diplomat put it, providing key support for the Contras. But he had close ties to Cuba as well. Panama was also a particular focus for the right wing because of the canal: “We built it! We paid for it! It's ours and we are going to keep it!” Reagan repeated in his 1976 primary stump speech, charging Messrs. Kissinger and Ford with wanting to hand the canal over to Panama.

Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's national security adviser, has said that Bush held a special animus toward Noriega, having worked directly with the Panamanian during his time as director of the CIA. But Panama, Scowcroft said, wasn't high on the administration's agenda when it took office at the beginning of 1989. A “warrant” had been issued for Noriega's arrest and the United States had been encouraging Noriega's opponents to overthrow him. That seemed to be the extent of the White House's interest in the country. “I can't really describe the course of events that led us this way,” Scowcroft said, referring to the invasion. “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.”
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Events came to a head in late 1989, when the coup that Washington had for months been calling for seemed to be taking place. The White House's response, however, was in “disarray.” The intelligence coming in was contradictory and unreliable. “All of us agreed at that point that we simply had very little to go on,” Dick Cheney, Bush's secretary of defense, later reported. The United States had lost communication with its would-be rebel-allies. “There was a lot of confusion at the time because there was a lot of confusion in Panama,” Cheney said.
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“We were sort of the Keystone Kops,” Scowcroft said, not knowing what to do or who to support. Noriega regained the upper hand.

The tipping point toward military action was domestic politics, as the White House came under intense criticism from politicians and pundits for seemingly having blown an opportunity to remove Noriega from power. 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, Scowcroft said, to the “whole wimp factor.”

In the midst of the confusion, it was Kissinger who calmed the waters and urged a tough response. Having established his New York–based consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, a few years earlier, he had been nearly fully rehabilitated. “The Unsinkable Kissinger Bobs Back,” was one
New York Times
headline.
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He had reconciled with Dick Cheney, and a number of his protégés had prominent positions in the White House, including Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser. This was around the time of Beijing's Tiananmen massacre, and Kissinger played a key role guiding the White House's forgiving response.

As the Bush administration fumbled, Kissinger, according to one report, provided two pieces of familiar advice. The first was that “scant” information “was the norm in a crisis.” The second was that scant information shouldn't be “an excuse for inaction.”
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And as momentum built for action, so did the pressure to find a suitable justification for action. Shortly after the failed coup, Dick Cheney claimed on PBS's
NewsHour
that the only objectives the United States had in Panama were to “safeguard American lives” and “protect American interests” by defending the 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 20, 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.

Cheney wasn't wrong about the “hue and cry.” Every single country other than the United States in the Organization of American States opposed the invasion of Panama. Bush acted anyway. What changed everything was the fall of the Berlin Wall just over a month before the invasion. As the Soviet Union's influence in its backyard (Eastern Europe) unraveled, Washington was left 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.

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 trumped the principle of national sovereignty. Latin American nations, long the target of “regime change” by Washington, immediately recognized the threat and sought to condemn the invasion in the Organization of American States. 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.”
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To be clear, it is not the military intervention that is important about Panama; Washington has been violating sovereignty in Latin America and doing it unilaterally for over a century. Rather, it is the speed with which,
immediately
following the end of the Cold War, Washington moved to legally and openly defend its unilateral action by invoking the ideal of democracy—indeed, to broadcast that ideal in the world's tribunals, like the Organization of American States. 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 that 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, 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 America's freedom fighters had largely been fighting against U.S.-backed anti-Communist right-wing death-squad states (most of them installed and backed during Henry Kissinger's tenure) was lost on the ambassador.

In the case of Panama, “democracy” quickly worked its way up the short list of casus belli. In his December 20 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. 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.”
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George Will, the conservative pundit, was quick to realize the significance of this new post–Cold War rationale for military action.
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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.” Freedom.

That was fast. From Keystone Kops to Thomas Paine in just two months, as the White House seized the moment to change the terms by which the United States engaged the world. In so doing, it overthrew both Manuel Noriega and what, for half a century, had been the bedrock foundation of the liberal multilateral order: the ideal of national sovereignty.

In the mythology of American militarism that has taken hold since George W. Bush's disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the actions of his father, George H. W. Bush, are often held up as a paragon of prudence—especially when compared to the later recklessness 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 duty of the United States to rid the world not just of evildoers but of evil itself. In contrast, the elder Bush, we are told, recognized the limits of American power. He was a realist, advised by other realists, Kissinger's protégés, including Lawrence Eagleburger and Scowcroft. His circumscribed Gulf War was a “war of necessity,” it is said, where his son's 2003 invasion of Iraq was a catastrophic “war of choice.”
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But the road to Baghdad ran through Panama City, with the 1989 invasion inaugurating the post–Cold War age of unilateral intervention. “Having used force in Panama,” Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, Thomas Pickering, recently said, “there was a propensity in Washington to think that force could provide a result more rapidly, more effectively, more surgically than diplomacy.”
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The easy capture of Noriega meant “the notion that the international community had to be engaged … was ignored.”
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“Iraq in 2003 was all of that shortsightedness in spades,” Pickering said. “We were going to do it all ourselves.” And we were going to do it in the name not of national security but of the “civilized advancement” of democracy. Later, after 9/11, when George W. Bush 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.