25 years ago the United States launched an unpopular invasion of a relatively powerless country to remove its dictator from power, a former US agent turned rogue. The President at the time was named Bush and one of his key officials was a guy called Dick Cheney. Not Iraq, but Panama: the beginning of the modern era of short, efficient wars that would culminate in the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan, the creation of ISIS, etc. The Panama War is hardly remembered today; it went much better for the invaders than later efforts would. But it too had its victims: Sandwiched between the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the commencement of the first Gulf War on January 17, 1991, Operation Just Cause might seem a curio from a nearly forgotten era, its anniversary hardly worth a mention... But the invasion of Panama should be remembered in a big way... it helps explain many of those events. In fact, you can’t begin to fully grasp the slippery slope of American militarism in the post-9/11 era — how unilateral, [preemptive] “regime change” became an acceptable foreign policy option, how “democracy promotion” became a staple of defense strategy, and how war became a branded public spectacle — without understanding Panama. ...U.S. officials didn’t bother to count the dead in El Chorrillo, a poor Panama City barrio that U.S. planes indiscriminately bombed because it was thought to be a bastion of support for [Manuel] Noriega... even conservative estimates of civilian fatalities suggested “that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civilians… were not faithfully observed by the invading U.S. forces... Civilians were given no notice. The Cobra and Apache helicopters that came over the ridge didn’t bother to announce their pending arrival by blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”... Fires engulfed the mostly wooden homes, destroying about 4,000 residences. Some residents began to call El Chorrillo “Guernica” or “little Hiroshima.” Shortly after hostilities ended, bulldozers excavated mass graves and shoveled in the bodies. “Buried like dogs,” said the mother of one of the civilian dead.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 06:29:46 +0000
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