I've been quietly researching material for a book about the 7th Infantry Division (Light) covering the Lightfighter era of 1983 through 1993. The 7thID(L) was the principle force behind Operation: Just Cause (OJC) in 1989, although pop culture tells you it was all Delta, SEALs, and Rangers. They conducted operations in Panama from 1988, through 1989's Operation Nimrod, OJC, and then operations Restore Liberty and Condor in 1990. The division redeployed to Fort Ord, CA in February 1990.
Here's the thing, there's a right and wrong was to do things. Noriega was problem. Yes, he was our problem, and someone we had propped up because we were lazy in how we dealt with Central American leadership, i.e. "Is he pro-communist? No? Alright, he's in." Anyway, the game had always when one of our dictators crossed the line they'd be "forced out in a coup", and would "flee to a non-extradition country" (of our choice) where they'd live out their lives playing golf or whatever. But Noriega actually thought he was in charge, and thus became a problem we had to fix.
In 1988, the US Marshall Service devised an operation to grab Noriega just like we saw with Maduro. The Bush NSC's lawyers killed the plan because kidnapping a foreign leader will set a dangerous precedent for the future. The smarter and legal move was to invade Panama, and we knew eventually Noriega would give us an excuse to do this. And he did. You have to hand it to the Panamanians, during Operation NIMROD we spent all year trying to antagonize them to provoke an armed response (we'd block their main highway to conduct a P.T. run, which is like blocking the New Jersey turnpike during rush hour, conduct training exercises with no advanced warning, etc.), and to the PDF's credit they never took the bait. But eventually American service members were killed and it was game-on.
But IMO the biggest oversite of military and political historians is that OJC was quickly forgotten, overshadowed by Desert Storm, and this gap in historical knowledge has directly led to the missteps of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF & OIF). We spent a lot of time writing libraries about the Vietnam War and the long list of reasons it ended the way it did, but it is just as important to understand OJC and why we won it. Panama remains the United States sole total military and political victory. Desert Storm will always have an Asterix by it as it left Saddam in power, and a No-Fly-Zone which gave a rising Al Qaeda a rallying cry, and UNSCOM which all directly put us in our current internal and international political nightmare.
We were lucky in Panama. Yes, we went in with a 3 to 1 advantage over the PDF, but Noriega was not loved by his soldiers, and most of the time we could use bullhorns to talk them into surrendering without a fight (none of them wanted to die for Noriega at Christmas). Yet had the PDF, and the civilian Dignity Battalions (Dig-Bats) decided to fight us, and drag us into the jungles OJC becomes a multi-year operation. OJC worked because, unlike Iraq where we removed the Baath Party, we stood up the duly elected government, and put the PDF back to work minus a few Noriega loyalists. This allowed US forces to focus on hunting down weapons caches, Noriega cronies, Cuban operatives, and conducting anti-drug missions along the Colombian border. And yes, we had two military bases in Panama, and the Canal Zone was under US control, so we also had that going for us.
Point is that we did our homework before we got Noriega. Panama is a lone bright spot in Central America. They still like us, and they use the dollar as their currency. The problems with Venezuela are many. Maduro is a scumbag, nobody is arguing he shouldn't end up on the end of a rope, but the US has never tried to make a case against him beyond terse speeches at the UN and DoS every once in a while, and that has caught us flat-footed now because our current President's administration has zero credibility at any level with anyone with more than a fourth-grade education. At least with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Grenada, and Diablo Canyon when we bombed Libya there were immediate Pentagon briefings with various pieces of evidence, usually aerial reconnaissance photos to justify our actions. We haven't got anything of substance from this White House. Worse still is that nobody in this administration understands, let alone cares about the long-term consequences of this raid.
I have to hope we've spun up a Venezuelan insurgency to take control, or are working with an established rebel group to shape the next government in our image. And yes that's jingoism, but at this point it's about putting out the fire instead of lighting our crotch on fire like we did in Iraq, because Iraq is far away, Venezuela is in our backyard. If we screw the next part up we will have bigger fish to fry in the future, and this current White House has gutted just about every department that can deal with it. This is not some kind of One & Done operation. There are serious problems in Venezuela, and they're about to become our problems under a US government run by a mix of idiots, dolt, party-wonks, crooks, and cowards.
Or as Hunter S. Thompson called it, The New Dumb.
