Dreaming about Noriega

...No people in Europe were more miserable than the Romanians, and yet they found the strength to rebel...

...What seemed to be involved here was not a high-level conspiracy to run roughshod over Panamanian sovereignty and diplomatic rules and deceive the public about it, but rather a military force out of its depth and partly out of civilian control...

...This seemed confirmed when, as one of the conditions for his surrender, Noriega asked to make several phone calls...

...That may not be the way Eastern European reformers want to go...

...Now comes the hard part, starting with Poland—the plunge into the icy waters of decontrol, slashed subsidies and currency convertibility...

...Second, the theory that revolution comes only with rising expectations, not from those too hungry, too numb in their oppression to be able to react...

...The U.S...

...Meanwhile Noriega, free on bail, travels around the country with a bevy of Federal marshals, lecturing for $2 5,000 a pop, giving news conferences and making television appearances...

...There were enough such incidents to leave the American public very confused, and some people wondering who was in charge of an invasion that resulted in the President having to express regrets for screwups...

...End of ap Era As for the other dictator, history did not end with the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime, but an era of history did...

...A few days later the prosecutor in Miami said no documents had been recovered that would bolster the case against Noriega...

...Indeed, he managed to sell himself to Western leaders, starting with President Richard M. Nixon, as a maverick national Communist who dared to stand up to the Kremlin...

...Before raiding the residence, the military command, I am told, checked with its ownlegaloffice, the Judge Advocate General...

...The Justice Department formally informed the Israeli government that he was being held as a "prisoner of war...

...The Communists clearly hope that, by the time of the elections next spring, they may be making a comeback...

...Nevertheless, at home Ceausescu was a true Stalinist...

...Army put a tap on a telephone switchbox outside the Vatican Embassy, where General Noriega had taken refuge, and reported that he was calling foreign banks, trying to withdraw money before it was frozen...

...Military information, self-serving, unsubtle and often unchecked, has its limitations, even when there does not appear to be a Vietnam-style central plan for managing the news...

...Out of touch with reality, apparently psychotic, Ceausescu would not yield to the future, as the rulers of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany had...

...What can be written about Noriega's further adventures so soon after his arrival on American soil is necessarily limited...

...In Warsaw and elsewhere the discredited Communists have beat a strategic retreat, leaving it to the former opposition to take the rap for belt-tightening...

...Test for the West The past year produced the euphoria of newly won freedom in Eastern Europe...

...That could bring disillusionment with reform...

...First, the theory that, in the modern age, military force is invariably stronger than an unarmed citizenry...

...President Bush called it "a screwup...

...Attorney presents a Justice Department memorandum holding that the jurisdiction of foreign states can be overridden to apprehend violators of American law...

...Effectively occupying a country it believes it has liberated, the expeditionary force tends to act by military logic, brushing aside considerations of sovereignty and international procedure...

...Leadersof countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia have indicated they are less attracted to the American model of rugged individualism, with its pinnacles of affluence and pockets of misery, than to the Scandinavian or Austrian model of a welfare state...

...In some surreal kind of counterpoint, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, a world apart, alternated on the tube— both murderous, both sybaritic, deposed, exposed, and disgraced by military power, but ultimately by people power, Ceausescu to be executed by a firing squad after a secret trial, Noriega to face more clement justice before an American court...

...The next day a spokesman for the Papal Nuncio stated that Noriega had no access to a telephone...

...But Romania taught some lessons that may require revisions in conventional political science theory...

...There seemed to be no thought of consulting the American Embassy or the State Department's legal adviser, Abraham Sofaer...

...The American command later stated that it had not known the house was covered by diplomatic immunity...

...But permit me some reflections on the massive invasion President George Bush launched last December 20...

...A few days later the military command said that Harari was not in American hands—that it had all been a case of mistaken identity, and that Harari had actually escaped before the invasion, perhaps having received advance warning...

...He breaks the one-month record for number of appearances on ABC television's Nightline, previously set by the Reverend Jim Bakker...

...His way of governing may survive for the present in Albania, always an anomaly, and in China, North Korea, Cambodia, and Cuba...

...A lot of outside help is needed...

...I awake from my dream as President Bush is offering Noriega a pardon on condition that he return to Panama...

...Former President Ronald Reagan had it right when he said, in his London Guildhall speech last June, that "the biggest of Big Brothers is increasingly helpless against communications technology...

...Shaken in the Philippines and Haiti, this proposition has now failed its test in Communist Eastern Europe...

...Third, the theory that a country can be shut off from the contagion of liberty elsewhere...

...One day American troops stormed the residence of the Nicaraguan ambassador in a weapons search...

...One day the military announced the capture of Mike Harari, former Israeli intelligence officer and a top adviser to Noriega...

...A year later, with the court still hearing preliminary arguments, Noriega is hosting his own television show, called "Miami Advice...

...So, in contrast with those countries, the denouement in Romania was bloody...

...For the West the test is whether it can provide support without trying, out of ideology or hubris, to dictate its own system...

...The book is finally closed on the Staun Age in Eastern Europe...

...This while an American news pool, operating under an arrangement elaborately developed to avoid landings uncovered by the media, like Grenada, was being kept far away from the action, but subjected to interminable military briefings that vaunted successes and obscured civilian casualties...

...Not that Ceausescu was a knee-jerk follower of the Soviet line...

...Drug czar William Bennett is a frequent guest...

...When the CIA refuses to release its files, several counts of the indictments are quashed...

...It soon became known that the house is clearly marked with an embassy shield the size of a manhole cover...

...National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft is fond of talking about "the fog of war," and it may have been such a fog that led the Pentagon to claim, prematurely, the end of effective resistance after the first day...

...The issue for the West is not only how muchhelp, but on whatterms...

...In Western Europe, after World War II, it took a dozen years and $ 12 billion in Marshall Plan funds to restore once healthy economies—a simpler task than creating free-market economies out of centrally controlled stagnation...

...As the case proceeds to trial, Noriega's lawyers introduce the "Ollie North defense"—that the General's drug activities were known to and sanctioned by the highest levels of the U.S government in the superior interest of combating the Sandinistas in Nicaragua...

...Such unhappiness is already visible in the Soviet Union...

...In Eastern Europe, however, the triumph of the people over subjugation is breathtakingly complete...

...There is a tendency here to hold Eastern Europe to an American private-enterprise standard as an ideal of perfection...

...They demand a subpoena for President Bush and records of Noriega's CIA services...

...With his execution Romania ended the cult of personality, arbitrary rule and the sacrifice of human lives in unlimited numbers to his personal and ideological purposes...

...Having long perceived Daniel Ortega's government in Managua as the enemy, the military would naturally designate a house with armed Nicaraguans as a target...

...Eastern Europe faces the severe test of whether it can stay on course through dislocation and privation, which could provoke a violent reaction...

...One day military briefers said they had captured a room full of files that would reveal details of Noriega's drug connections with South American countries...

...A diplomat who asked not to be identifiedsaid, "When youhavealotof troops, you're always going to have incidents of confusion...

...It recounts a bad dream that starts with Noriega being released on $5 million bail...

...The Bush Administration has talked as though the failure of Communism equals the success of American capitalism...

...A famous Harvard Law School professor volunteers to argue Noriega's case before the World Court in The Hague...

...That did not work in East Germany or Czechoslovakia, and it did not work in Romania, where there was no direct access to Western television...

...In 1969, Nixon honored him with the first visit ever by an American President to a Communist capital—a visit that opened what became known as "the Romanian channel" to the Chinese Communist regime...

...In war, it is said, truth is the first casualty...

...For example: • One day the U.S...

...Attorney General Dick Thornburgh says the United States will not accept the court's jurisdiction...

...A battery of lawyers then asserts in a pretrial hearing that Noriega has been kidnapped in violation of Panamanian sovereignty...

...And the new regimes, lacking full control of the military and security apparatus, are less well equipped than President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to weather popular anger...

...As to Noriega's future, indulge me while I dust off a commentary I did on National Public Radio after the unsuccessful coup against him last October...