ESSAY

By Barbara Ehrenreich

We don't want another Vietnam, everyone says, squinting into the desert sun. We want something swift and decisive, short and sweet -- a Panama perhaps. For these are the two poles of our collective military memory: on the one hand, the quicksand of Vietnam; on the other, the "brilliant success" of Panama, ; or so it was heralded at the time -- a military action so flawless, so perfectly executed that, as one of the generals responsible for carrying out the invasion boasted shortly afterward, "There were no lessons learned."

On Dec. 20, 1989, you will recall, the U.S. Army invaded the nation of Panama and soon thereafter arrested its de facto head of state. The U.N. General Assembly swiftly denounced the invasion as a "flagrant violation of international law," but never mind -- for most Americans, the lofty ends justified the brutal and lawless means. We had to stop the drug traffic. We had to restore stability and, as usual where guns and flag waving are involved, democracy.

Now, more than a year after the arrest of the loathsome dictator, it's fair to ask: What did we accomplish in Panama? Because if Panama is to be our standard for success and the yardstick by which any action in the Persian Gulf may be measured, we ought to know what "success" looks like -- after the smoke clears, that is, and the dead have all been laid to rest.

First, there's the matter of drugs. In August 1990 the New York Times reported that according to Panamanian pilots and dockworkers, the cocaine traffic was back to preinvasion levels and, if anything, "more open and abundant than before." American officials believe that the Panamanian banking industry still serves as a Laundromat for the hemisphere's cocaine profits, but the U.S.-installed government of Guillermo Endara is resisting a pact that would help catch drug-money depositors.

Democracy is a little harder to assess, but by all accounts most of the gains have accrued to Panama's tiny, white-skinned elite of wealth. In the wake of the invasion, labor unions have been repressed and nonwhites shut out of high-ranking government positions. With unemployment running at more than 25%, crime is rampant, and angry protest marches are once again a common sight. President Endara, who is notoriously indifferent to the nation's low- income majority, has so far refused to legitimate his apparent preinvasion victory with new elections -- a tactless omission for a man who was sworn in, with few Panamanians even present, on a U.S. military base.

Then there's the dictator. When Manuel Noriega was apprehended, some commentators wondered whether he would ever really be brought to trial, given what he might reveal about his long association with former CIA Director George Bush. They were right to wonder. With the revelation -- mysteriously leaked to CNN -- that the U.S. government has been eavesdropping on Noriega's conversations with his lawyers, the prosecution may have opened the door for Noriega to walk, untried, to a relaxing life in exile.

So that's the sordid aftermath of Operation Just Cause, as the invasion was called. And the human cost? Twenty-three American service members' lives -- which is not bad unless one of them happened to be your husband, son, sweetheart or father -- and the lives of somewhere between 202 (the U.S. estimate) and 4,000 Panamanian civilians. That may not sound so bad either, until you recall that the number of Kuwaiti deaths in the Iraqi invasion was in the same general range: between "hundreds" (Amnesty International's estimate) and 7,000 (according to exiled Kuwaitis).

If this was "success," one shudders to think what failure might look like. And one shudders with particular horror because the same tape is now on instant replay: a cruel thug and former U.S. ally, who just happens to be sitting on a key resource (oil this time, the canal in Noriega's case), has been singled out as the President's personal nemesis and casus belli -- only that the outcome, this time around, is likely to be infinitely bloodier. With all due respect to the general cited above, Panama may, after all, hold a lesson to be learned.

The first, it seems to me, has to do with the limits of official foresight. Conservative ideologues talk about a "law of unintended consequences," which means, roughly, that the effort to fix things sometimes worsens the damage. Of course, the ideologues apply the "law" selectively, as an argument against antipoverty efforts, not military ventures abroad.

But if anything illustrates the pitfalls of well-intended meddling, it's Panama, not the much-maligned War on Poverty. Clearly, the aim was not to promote the cocaine trade or reduce Panama from a mere banana republic to the status of international basket case, yet that's what we seem to have accomplished. Before pulling the trigger on Saddam Hussein, shouldn't we reflect, as true conservatives surely would want us to, on the dangerous arrogance of all human schemes and designs? Shouldn't we tally up the entirely possible and thoroughly unintended consequences of a war in the gulf? An ever deeper recession, for example, a wave of anti-American terrorism, a devastating attack on Israel?

The second lesson is that however noble the ends, the use of force always ^ entails one tragic and, realistically speaking, intended consequence, and that is the loss of lives. Maybe, if President Bush ever overcomes his obsession with Saddam, he might think about how to repay the estimated $1 billion in damage caused by his invasion of Panama. But the dead, whether they number in the thousands or "only" hundreds, will not wake up to see that happy day. Nor will the tens of thousands who may die in a gulf war -- Americans, Iraqis and others -- ever stir again once the tanks have rolled away across the sand.

Before he orders another shot fired, George Bush ought to stop and count very slowly to 10 because, as everyone fears, we may be wading into a Vietnam. Or what could be in the long term just about as bad -- another Panama.