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The Vietnam experience shattered America's pride and confidence.
Every foreign policy problem
is
viewed as a potential Vietnam whether it is or
not. First it was Angola; now it's Panama.
whose 7,000-man Nat ional Guard is
at any given moment outnumbered
by 9,300 superbly trained U.S.
troops permanently stationed in the
Canal Zone (to say nothing of the
hundreds of thousands of reinforce–
ments available).
" The sheer absurdity of Pan–
ama's defiant threats of violence,"
writes Canal historian Harold Lord
Varney, "staggers the imaginati9n.
Not since Swift's Lilliput has so little
chaUenged so much."
New treaty advocates, opined the
Wa/1 Street Journal,
appear to have
a "trembling fear of the Pan–
amanian Wehrmacht," and reason
that
"if
we don't ratify the treaty
Panama will Vietnam us.... But if
we do ratify the treaty, a ll those
otherwise excitable guerrilJas and
saboteurs will absorb themselves in
siestas and macrame unti l the year
2000."
As newspaper columnist Patrick
J.
Buchanan asked recently: "When
will we stop lying to ourselves?" Be–
hind the new treaties lies·"weakness
posturing as maturity, appeasement
masking as moral superiority."
Attempting to counter the pre–
vailing climate of fear and appease–
ment, a newspaper ad was recently
placed by a task-force group op–
posed to the new Panama arrange–
ment.
It
read in part: " What
prevents most thin gs and most
people from being assaulted is the
will to defend against those assaults.
Would Panama 's dictator really
want to face the military might of
the United States if our leaders
clearly made known our determina–
tion to protect our national interest?
"The ramifications of such weak–
ness," the ad continued, " literally
could destroy America. If we cannot
defend American property for
which we paid both in human lives
and gold, what can we defend? Ifwe
cannot be proud of our engineering,
commercial, medical , peace-keeping
and other laudatory accomplish-
8
ments in the Cana l Zone, m what
can we find pride?"
Pride Broken
Pride? Yes, pride. That is the funda–
mental issue at stake. The pride of
America's power has been broken
"bone by bone" over the years since
1945, to the point where the patient
is almost an impotent cripple. And
the back was broken in Vietnam!
Again, because of the Vietnam
syndrome, America's leaders today
are forced to revise the entire his–
tory of U.S. involvement in the Pan–
ama Canal enterprise in order to
justify an ignominious withdrawal.
U.S. chief negotiator Ellsworth
Bunker assens that "what we're in–
terested in is use of the Canal, not
its ownership." How more ignorant
of history could he and others who
have said the same thing possibly
be? Ownership was
the key
to those
Americans who dreamed of, de–
signed and built the Canal in the
first place.
In the current best-seLiing book
about the Canal,
The Path Between
the Seas,
author David McCul–
lough makes specific note of how
Presiden! Theodore Roosevelt, un–
der whose leadership the Canal
project began, looked upon the en–
terprise.
"lt
was very well for othe rs
to talk of it as the dream of Colum–
bus, to call it a giant step in the
march of civilization, or to pic–
ture ... its immeasurable value to
world commerce," he writes.
"Roosevelt was promoting neither
a commercial venture nor a univer–
sal utility. To
him.
fi rst, last, aod
always, the Canal was the vital- the
iodispeosable-path to a global des–
tiny for the United States of Amer–
ica. He had a vision of his country
as the commanding power on two
oceans, and these joined by a Canal
built, owned, operated, policed, and
fortified by his country. The Canal
was to be the first step to American
supremacy at sea. All other benefits
resulting, importan! or admirable as
they might be, were to him secoo–
dary."
"Unrelleved Retreat"
The America of only seven decades
ago doesn't exist any longer. The
America of 1945- sitting atop the
very pinnacle of world power- also
no longer exists. The leadership of
contemporary America is as far re–
moved from both turn-of-the-cen–
tury and World-War-11 U.S.A. as
could possibly be.
As Patrick Buchanan said in his
New York Times
column: "No
rhetoric can disguise the reality ....
Wha t Teddy Roosevelt acquired,
the American government cannot
even hold.
"Sixty years ago, this country
would have responded to hints of
riot and sabotage not with negotia–
tions. General Torrijos would have
been fortunate to make it to the
foothills
oc
the jungle before bis suc–
cessor was sworn in-with a U.S.
marine holding the Bible.
" Let us be honest with ourselves
and not cloak this weakness in a suit
of virtue. We are giving up the Ca–
nal because the U.S. leadersbip no
longer has the vision, dynamism
and will to ask of the American
people the sacrifices needed to
maintain our position in the world.
"The America of Capt. A.
T.
Mahan, Adm. Dewey and Teddy
Roosevelt is gone.... Carthage is in
full retreat before the rising military
power of Rome."
Buchanan's brutally perceptive
analysis reminds one of the passage
in the book of Isaiah: " For, behold,
the Lord, the Lord of hosts, is taking
away ... the mighty man and the
sold ier, the judge and the prophet,
the diviner and the elder, the cap–
tain of fifty and the man of rank....
And
1
will make boys their princes,
and babes shall rule over them"
(Isa. 3: 1-4, RSV).
But why has this erosion in Amer-
The
PLAIN TRUTH January 1978