On a Political Snipe Hunt and Still Cheering Loudly : Panama: As with the Tonkin Gulf resolution, Congress may regret the day it feared to challenge a President on a foreign intervention.

Applause is ringing in President Bush’s ears. Gen. Manuel A. Noriega is in U.S. custody and awaiting trial. Opinion polls show broad public support for the invasion and occupation of Panama.

Moreover, among senior Democratic congressional leaders or would-be Presidents, only the voice of Jesse Jackson has been raised to question the intervention.

As other Presidents before him, Bush no doubt will bask in the near-term glow of his heavyweight knockout of a featherweight adversary. But over the longer term, the odds are strong that neither the President nor his Democratic opposition will find much later glory in the exercise.

In the summer of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson seized on what turned out to be a fictional North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. naval vessel to jam the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress. That gave him the justification he sought for expansion of the U.S. role in Vietnam.

The resolution’s floor manager was Sen. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and later a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. The only senators speaking or voting against it were Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska--regarded, as Jackson is today, as quixotic mavericks. Later, when Vietnam went sour, many who spoke and voted for the resolution said that they’d been misled or fooled by the President. Truth is, many had suspected at the time that they were being taken for a political snipe hunt. They opted for the safe course of going along or keeping silent.

Now again, self-deception and silence have become the order of the day. Behind closed doors, hardly a senator or representative would deny that the justifications given for the Panama intervention were laughable.

Any U.S. President would have solid grounds for intervention--even unilateral intervention--south of the Rio Grande, if the security and integrity of Mexico or the Panama Canal were genuinely threatened. But in this case neither circumstance applied. A U.S. serviceman had been shot and a serviceman’s wife “sexually threatened.� Gen. Noriega was a long-documented drug dealer and despot. Efforts to bribe Noriega, a long-time CIA asset, into exile had failed.

None of these circumstances, alone or together, was or is sufficient reason for the commitment of thousands of American troops and hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, the loss of hundreds of Panamanian and more than two dozen American lives, and the disruption of an economy that now will require additional millions in U.S. aid to be resurrected. Nor did the circumstances justify the dangerous precedent set by the intervention or the inevitable erosion of the U.S. moral and diplomatic position in Latin America and elsewhere.

If these criteria are to trigger armed interventions of Panama-scale, U.S. troops soon will be occupying dozens of places around the world (including several major American cities) where drug-dealing, political corruption and physical assaults on U.S. citizens are common. And elsewhere, others with power will be able to claim legitimacy for their applications of force in places ranging from Lithuania to Beijing to the West Bank.

As time passes, it will be seen that--at the very moment when unilateral applications or threats of force had become most discredited in the world at large--it was the United States which cavalierly chose to undertake a 10-kiloton military operation to eradicate an annoying and temporary Central American flyspeck. We will not be judged well for it.

Among those voices most highly praising the President’s Panamanian venture have been those of many political leaders who came to prominence with their opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. It does not cross their minds, apparently, that some intellectual or ethical contradiction might be involved. Perhaps, after all, the political community learned little from our Vietnam experience except that when policy mistakes fail, dissent is appropriate. When they seem to succeed, cheers are in order.