How the 1989 War on Manuel Noriega’s Panama Super-Charged US Militarism
Greg Grandin
Manuel Noriega is dead at 83. He seems like a sad footnote to the last disastrous quarter century, but the December 1989 US invasion of Panama really was a permission slip for Washington—led by both Republicans and Democrats—to waste whatever potential benefits the end of the Cold War might have brought. Remember the “peace dividend”? The Berlin Wall had just fallen on November 9, and George H.W.