Word: panama
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...level political exchanges -- by twice sending Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to the Chinese capital; their first visit, in July, came to light only last week. Beijing has yet to reciprocate with any significant concession, and last week expressed "utmost shock and strong condemnation" of the Panama invasion. But the U.S. moves furthered a bold and individual policy. Bush, who was once envoy to China, believes the strategic relationship with the Middle Kingdom to be all important and is willing to nurture it at whatever cost in criticism...
...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...