Word: noriega
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...