Good morning! New from me: those who say the US can bring narco kingpin Maduro justice because it's been done before with Noriega in Panama in 1989 are foolish, said one retired officer who served in Panama AND Iraq. For one, the intelligence on the ground:
“We had thousands of troops down there who were married to Panamanian women. They had their in-laws spread across the country. All of them hated Noriega. We had people coming in to work in the base who hated Noriega and would tell us all kinds of things,” said the retired officer. “They’d grab me because I was a Spanish-speaking officer, and they're like, let me tell you this, this, this, and this. I got guys who would tell me where the checkpoints were every day as they were coming in.”
“Here's a great story,” he added. “We got a report of Noriega militias massing in a neighborhood in Panama City, and my roommate called his girlfriend who lived there and she said it wasn't true, that's what we could do.”
The experts cautioned that the most important take-away from Panama is not that the invasion and capture of Noriega was “easy” but that, despite establishing a working democracy, it did not necessarily make life in Panama any easier. It did not stop the crime and illicit drug flows into the U.S. and, if anything, it gave Washington a false sense of how it could pursue intervention and regime change in the future. The prime example is the much larger First Gulf War of 1991, just two years later. H.W. Bush declined to depose Iraq’s Saddam Hussein at the time, but his son was convinced to follow through in 2003, resulting in one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy debacles in modern history.
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