Word: panama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...criticized for action than for dithering. His growing self-confidence has been helped along, aides assert, by his well-developed personal relations with other world leaders, whom he incessantly writes and telephones. (Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle were busy until 3 o'clock the night of the Panama invasion, calling foreign leaders to inform them of the President's decision.) These contacts, aides say, have given Bush a feel for how the world will react to any particular U.S. move -- or, in other words, for what he can and cannot get away with...
...President's new decisiveness is his obsession with secrecy. There is an aura of scary smugness about Bush these days, a schoolboyish delight in saying, as he did to reporters about the Malta summit, "I knew something you didn't." Secrecy obviously is necessary in planning something like a Panama invasion. But Bush and his confidants have on occasion carried it to the point of deliberately misleading Congress and the public -- not to mention ranking members of their own Administration -- as with the supposed ban on high-level political talks with the Chinese...
...Panama decision in particular was held within a small circle; Joint Chiefs spokesman Colonel William Smullen asserts that "there were a handful, really a small number, of people in this entire building ((the Pentagon)) who knew this operation was going to happen." In retrospect, though, the invasion looks inevitable. The U.S. through two Administrations built Noriega into a menacing monster -- instead of what he was, the tin-pot dictator of a not very important country -- and put its credibility on the line in declaring that he had to go. But everything Washington tried -- propaganda, economic sanctions, attempts to foment...
Noriega obligingly provided it. The dictator had his rubber-stamp People's Assembly name him "Maximum Leader" and declare that American provocations created a "state of war" between the two countries. That coincided with attacks on U.S. servicemen in Panama. There had previously been hundreds of . similar incidents and not all one-sided; in an altercation outside a laundry in Panama City, a U.S. officer, who was not supposed to be carrying a gun, shot and wounded a Panamanian. It is possible too that Washington took Noriega's declaration of "war" more seriously than it was intended. Nonetheless, the President...
...White House following the Christmas party "started as an in-depth briefing" of Bush by his senior aides, says a participant. The President was especially infuriated to hear details of the incident in which an American Navy lieutenant was pulled out of a car and beaten by Panama Defense Forces soldiers while his wife was threatened with gang rape. "Enough is enough," said Bush. "This guy ((Noriega)) is not going to lay off. It will only get worse...