Word: norths
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some questions are so fraught with political ambiguity that a criminal trial cannot answer them completely. One such conundrum: Who should be held accountable for the Iran-contra affair? Last week a jury in Washington rendered a judgment on retired Marine Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. But it was a verdict equivocal enough for both the defendant and the prosecutor to hail it. North proclaimed a "partial vindication" because he was found not guilty of nine felony charges. Prosecutor John W. Keker asserted that North's convictions on three other counts demonstrated "the principle that no man is above...
They were both right. The criminal case against North had divided the complicated scandal into discrete and comprehensible acts, like lying to Congress, tampering with evidence and illegally converting funds to his own use. But such narrow charges barely touched broader and still unanswered questions: To what extent was the former National Security Council staffer, as he claimed in his defense, following orders when he led a secret effort to provide assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels in defiance of congressional bans? Were present and former Government officials, including Ronald Reagan and George Bush, involved in a cover...
Deployment of North American military forces could succeed in ousting General Noriega. It would also diminish chances for an autonomous Panamanian democracy and inevitably reinforce Panamanian and all Latin American resentment and mistrust of the United States...
THIS mistrust is not ill-placed, as past U.S. intervention indicates. Nicaragua is attacked presumably for its socialist ideology of land expropriation; Cuba, for its willingness to fight foreign wars; Peru, for its refusal to strangle itself through debt payments. North American imperialist attitudes of the last two decades have shifted to the ideological and economic level...
Panama, however, is a victim of the old-style, territorialist tendencies of U.S. imperialism. After Jimmy Carter signed an agreement scheduling the return of the Panama Canal to Panama in the year 2000, North Americans suddenly discovered a real stake in good relations with this tiny country...