Gentleman's agreement

A bipartisan agreement lets Clinton evade comment and action on the fate of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

By Christopher Hitchens

Dec 8, 1998 | In December 1989, the U.S. armed forces descended in strength on Panama City, flattening a few of the poorer barrios, and took Gen. Manuel Noriega prisoner before "extraditing" him on a military aircraft bound for Florida. Some of the niceties were observed (a new Panamanian president was hastily sworn in on the tarmac of an American Air Force base), but not, it is safe to say, all the niceties.

So slight was the attention to international law, in fact, that the Bush administration was forced to depend for endorsement on the only two allies that never deserted it -- namely British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the congressional Democrats. Thatcher declared herself delighted that this thug had been brought to justice. The Democrats checked the polls, as they tend to do, and went along, as they always had. Asked to nominate a pretext for apprehending Noriega, the Bush administration halfheartedly cited the wife of a U.S. Navy lieutenant who had been badly roughed up by the general's goons.

The gorgeously uniformed Noriega, newly clad in prison garb, was duly convicted of some bad stuff related to narcotics and put under lock and key. He was not embarrassed by any questions about the whereabouts of his former political critics, in a country where the word "former" carries no implication of early retirement. Nor did the Florida court evince any curiosity about his role in the still-open Iran-contra business. Nor has anyone mentioned him in the current controversy about the "disposal" problem posed by another Latin America brute. But now, when it comes to the noninvasion detention of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Thatcher is incandescent with righteous rage, and the Democrats, having consulted the polls, have decided that nothing is expected of them.

A good question to ask, of any Clinton policy, is "What would George Bush have done?" This must, after all, be the question that Clinton asks himself. Sometimes, it's true, he goes for something flashy out of the Reagan or Nixon repertoire. But in general, he is predictable. Leave the economy to Greenspan and Wall Street and take the credit; pose as a "globalist" at all international summits; act as a provincial isolationist when global standards could impede the imperial liberties of the United States. There, that's not so hard, is it? In fact, it's easier than pie because Clinton can count on minimal opposition from liberals -- a boon that for Reagan and Bush was too much to expect.

I don't think that a Republican administration could have gone for three whole months, cost-free, without saying a word about the Pinochet case. (Indeed, I sometimes think that a Republican administration that sabotaged the land-mine treaty and negated the near-unanimous vote on an international court for war crimes, as Clinton did, would have attracted some criticism, too.) But it turns out, as so often, that bipartisanship really does do its job, by putting all controversial questions into a twilight zone.

Next Page: All just part of the game of "Let's move on"

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