“The University of Panama’s seismograph marked 442 major explosions in the first 12 hours of the invasion, about one major bomb blast every two minutes. 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. 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. So many earth-shattering events have happened since. But the invasion of Panama should be remembered in a big way. After all, 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, preemptory ‘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.”
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 23:30:02 +0000
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