Weeding our back yard

...leaders have tried to convince Latins that the big stick was a thing of the past...

...When the dust clears from the U.S...

...The third component of Caribbean Basin policy involves defending the various U.S...

...Military interventionism was to be a thing of the past-good neighbors had subtler methods of attaining their ends...

...It's not even past...

...and the Caribbean Basin...

...Because our country has always dominated the region, the national security establishment believes any change in that relation will reduce our prestige and credibility...

...The second component of U.S...

...But Latins have a memory we don't...

...interest and presence...

...Long after President Endara and his mentor President Bush are gone, Latin Americans will remember our invasion and the arrogant policy that prompted it...

...As part of the Monroe Doctrine, this policy has sought to prevent extrahemispheric powers from establishing a foothold in the basin...

...It also explains the refusal to improve relations with Cuba...

...It assumes, incidentally, that no Latin nation can or will itself become a significant power...

...avoid or eliminate any threat that might require deployment of significant military forces in defense of the southern frontier...

...goods (behind the EEC, Canada, and Japan), taking about 14 percent of our exports...

...Though such charges, involving other high Panamanian officials, go back at least to the mid-1950s, they never caused serious problems between the U.S...

...third border" as it is often called...

...Paradoxically, however, the policymakers tolerate Cuba because to do otherwise-that is, to invade-would violate the "economy of force" aspect of the southern flank doctrine...

...POLICY BEHIND THE PANAMA INVASION KARL BERMANN Propinquity creates special political rela-tions," wrote George Weitzel, President Taft's envoy to Nicaragua during the hey-day of gunboat diplomacy and big-stick interventionism...

...The Panama invasion has a long history behind it...

...We don't hear much about it because the State Department doesn't print it up and pass it out at press conferences...

...And as Panama's rulers resume their historic role as the junior partners of the United States, Washington is likely once again to find its interests inclining it to look the other way...

...and Panama as long as that country's leaders were cooperating on other matters...

...Panama is not a major U.S...

...Taking for granted that "propinquity" creates special relations, and the corollary assumption that it's this country's prerogative, by virtue of its dominant position (if not by divine right), to define those relations, the U.S...

...William Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead...

...On occasion, U.S...

...He is the author o/Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States since 1848 (South End Press...

...Although it holds only 8 percent of all U.S...

...prestige and credibility...

...Trade between the East Coast and Latin America, the East Coast and Asia, and domestic intercoastal commerce all passes through the region...

...Reagan's advisers judged the Grenada invasion feasible because they were convinced it would involve only a small commitment of forces for a very short time...

...In 1947 Harry Truman presided over creation of the Rio Pact alliance and, the following year, the Organization of American States (OAS...

...It is the fourth and final component of Caribbean Basin policy that made the Panama invasion practically inevitable...

...Beating the drums for Jeffersonian expansionism in 1804, Joseph Chandler hailed the Louisiana Purchase as "the commencement of our anticipating hopes" for an empire that would ultimately stretch from the North Pole to "the vertical sun of Darien"-today's Panama...

...supervision...

...The first encompasses concern directly related to the physical proximity of the Caribbean Basin-the U.S...

...Ironically, by providing that the canal will be under sole Panamanian jurisdiction by the year 2000, the treaties were intended to unburden U.S.-Latin relations from a last irritating vestige of the big-stick era...

...Responding to the pull of Latin nationalism, the once deferential organization rejected a Carter administration proposal to send a "peacekeeping" force to Nicaragua like the one sent to the Dominican Republic thirteen years earlier...

...The express goal of Thomas Jefferson's commissioners in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, which gave us our "doorstep" on the Caribbean Basin, was to obtain New Orleans as a secure outlet for Midwest produce...

...leaders have traditionally offered a laundry list of reasons for our frequent interventions in the basin, apparently on the theory that the practice increases the marketability of the action in question and reduces the likelihood that any single justification will be scrutinized closely...

...KARL BERMANN is doing research for a book on the U.S...

...Article 15 of the OAS Charter says, "No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state...

...It's a lesson the government that owes its existence to our invasion will be only too anxious to prove it understands...

...While the military aspect of the "secure southern flank" is by far the longest-standing concern related to the physical proximity of the Caribbean Basin, it is by no means the only one...

...He could just as well have been referring to current events in Panama...

...The invasion's lesson for the Caribbean Basin is not that you don't mix with Medellin, but that you don't mess with the U.S...

...It plays a dominant role in supplying us with two strategic raw materials-85 percent of our imported bauxite and 70 percent of our imported refined petroleum products...

...Nevertheless, the uncertainty and economic dislocation resulting from the U.S.-Noriega confrontation was bad for business, and this must have furnished an incentive, albeit a secondary one, for the U.S...

...And as one of those who helped establish our imperialistic reputation in Latin America, no doubt he would feel entirely at home in the Bush State Department...

...Longstanding strategic thinking counsels that the U.S...

...In 1983 Ronald Reagan ignored the OAS altogether, giving the Grenada invasion the "collective" fig leaf of the hitherto unknown Organization of East Caribbean States...

...A 1983 Rand Corporation study for the Air Force called the Caribbean Basin "the cradle from which the United States arose to become a world power...

...That's not to say there aren't other important factors weighing against such an invasion-the domestic and international political consequences, for example...

...Yet the familiar buzz words that flood the mind when considering U.S.-Latin American relations-"back yard," "big stick," "gunboat diplomacy," "Monroe Doctrine," "sphere of influence," "imperialism," and the like-cloud as much as clarify the substance of the policies being pursued...

...second, they would herd the other Americans together under Washington's cold-war umbrella...

...This symbolic value has often caused its security to be offered as justification for intervention in the Caribbean when the real causes lay elsewhere...

...Panama was certainly not a military threat to the United States...

...Before the Civil War successive U.S...

...Still, the canal retains its place as a symbol of U.S...

...Nonetheless, that policy continues to guide all our significant foreign policy decisions and actions in that region, just as it has since it first began to take shape with the Louisiana Purchase...

...In any event, it is highly unlikely under present conditions that any Panamanian government could be free from the corrupting influence of drug money...

...Most of the investments in the basin are concentrated in Mexico and Venezuela, but Panama's share is about $5 billion, more than the five Central American countries together...

...Dispensing with collectivism altogether, Bush sought sanction for the Panama invasion in a clause of the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaties that allows the U.S...

...Elaborated in state papers, policy discussions, and think-tank studies, our Caribbean Basin policy consists of a set of four supposedly vital interests that policymakers defend and conditions they seek to preserve...

...military arsenal in a long and costly war just where the planners seek to avoid committing them-with incalculable consequences for the strategic posture elsewhere...

...One can only speculate, however, on what the calculations might be were the easing of tensions in Europe to make greater military resources available for use in the Western Hemisphere...

...occupation troops in Nicaragua...

...has woven together over two centuries a special Caribbean Basin policy...

...Or, in the words of a 1984 study commission headed by Brent Scowcroft, President Bush's national security advisor, "Events in the Caribbean are a significant manifestation of the effectiveness of the United States as a world power...

...Put this together with his international isolation, his lack of popular support at home, and the fact that his army was not a credible military deterrent, and Noriega became a target Washington simply could not resist...

...foreign investment, this figure accounts for 32 percent of our investments in the third world-traditionally a source of superprofits...

...There is no reason to think Noriega threatened any of these economic interests...

...power...

...administrations worried that slave uprisings or emancipation in the Caribbean might spark rebellions among slaves in our own South...

...Now George Bush has retaken Panama, perhaps proving the adage that history repeats itself as farce...

...But to have Noriega, a renegade one-time CIA asset, loose in a region in ferment, heading a country that was once a secure base for our low-intensity warfare operations (itself the expression of the "economy offeree" doctrine), without doubt gave national security hardliners nightmares...

...Although he referred to the southern United States, his comment is perhaps even more relevant to the greater South beyond the Gulf of Mexico...

...to intervene if the Panama Canal is threatened...

...The basin is the fourth largest foreign market for U.S...

...Ninety-nine years later, Theodore Roosevelt bragged that he "took Panama" to build the canal and show that the Caribbean had become an American lake...

...No country in the basin is more symbolic of our traditional domination than Panama, and that made Noriega's nose-thumbing all the more intolerable...

...to solve the Noriega "problem" sooner rather than later...

...That in large part explains the Bay of Pigs invasion and the subsequent efforts to eliminate the "Cuban threat" by assassinating Fidel Castro...

...Allegations of Noriega's drug connections long predate his falling out with Washington...

...Weitzel was justifying the existence of a government installed by U.S...

...A large portion of our trade, including trade with Europe, transits the Caribbean Basin en route to and from Gulf Coast ports-the Gulf itself is part of the basin...

...By 1978, however, as the Somoza regime crumbled in Nicaragua, the cold-war glue could no longer keep the OAS stuck to our coattails...

...This involves U.S...

...But even these relate to the question of "economy of force...

...invasion, drug money will surely find its way to the highest echelons of the Endara government...

...But these, like the drug issue, were merely handy rationales...

...It would tie up hundreds of thousands of troops and a large part of the U.S...

...economic interests-trade, investments, and raw materials...

...and third, they would avoid the bad feeling of the past by replacing unilateral U.S...

...The system worked according to plan through the mid-1960s...

...intervention with collective intervention (under U.S...

...Drugs, of course, provided the major public rationale for the Panama invasion, but available evidence suggests drugs were merely a pretext...

...Cuba violates this doctrine in the eye of our national security establishment...

...global force projection presupposes a docile "back yard" that doesn't require the allocation of major military resources for its defense, yet provides secure reserves of strategic raw materials...

...The tragedy, apart from the body count, is that a Caribbean Basin policy fashioned in the days of Manifest Destiny, geostrategic Darwinism, and the white man's burden, still guides a Washington too anxious to prove its power in a changing world...

...As things turned out in Grenada, they were right...

...President Bush listed canal security and the integrity of the canal treaty among his invasion goals...

...The strictly military component is known as "maintaining a secure southern flank...

...Today security analysts list the drug traffic and the flow of Caribbean Basin refugees among their "spillover" concerns...

...For the moment it's back to business as usual in Panama...

...These bodies had a threefold utility for the United States: First, they would preserve the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine by preempting UN involvement in the Western Hemisphere (as provided under Articles 51-53 of the UN Charter...

...trading partner, nor does it produce vital raw materials...

...But it is the site of an important oil pipeline and is also a major regional financial center...

...With World War II looming on the horizon, Franklin Roosevelt sought through his Good Neighbor Policy to undo the damage done by his predecessors in order to win hemispheric allegiance...

...The Panama Canal is still important as one of these "sea lines of communications," though not as important as it once was...

...Failure to deal maturely and effectively with events at the doorstep is likely to be taken at home and abroad as yet another sign of declining U.S...

...Bush's advisers obviously calculated that the Panama invasion could be carried out in the same "surgical" manner...

...Thus it would not disrupt the strategic balance in Europe or Asia and could be over and done with before opposition had a chance to organize...

...Caribbean policy has to do with maintaining the security of "sea lines of communication"-bureaucratese for the shipping routes that crisscross the area...

...We should note, however, that they do seem to understand that Nicaragua is in a different league and that an invasion there would be prohibitively costly, at least under present circumstances...

...Taking its cue from Washington, the OAS ostracized Cuba, and in 1965 fronted for Lyndon Johnson's Dominican Republic invasion (nominally an OAS operation...