The United States government stated that it was compelled to invade Panama in December 1989 to remove drug_trafficker and military dictator Manuel Noriega from power. Noriega had overturned the results of at least two Panamanian elections and ruled the country by the use of the Panama Defense Force and brutal Dignity Battalions, which were militia groups that acted at his behest. Thus, on December 15, 1989, U.S. President Bush authorized the largest military airlift since Vietnam to "to protect American lives, restore the democratic process, preserve the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties and apprehend Manuel Noriega". As this paper demonstrates, however, numerous authors since then have stated unequivocally that the U.S. government's stated reasons were neither the truth nor sufficient justification for invading another country.
In their book State Crime, The Media and The Invasion of Panama, Christina Johns and P. Ward Johnson argue unequivocally that the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, titled Operation Just Cause, was an illegal act. The authors begin with an analytical review of U.S._Panama relations. They conduct this review through the prism of what they call the U.S. "rollback" foreign policy in a post Cold War world. Johns and Johnson suggest that, despite the official end of the Cold War with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1986, American foreign policy still divided the world along pro_ and anti_communist divisions. Rollback policy was "the determination of U.S. policy elites to return to a pre-communist world, with the final goals of eliminating communism in the USSR and establishing free_market capitalism worldwide" with the United States as the premier world leader.
Significantly, Johns and Johnson argue that one feature of this new world order based on American rollback policy was the service role envisioned for Latin American countries and peoples. Under the policy, countries such as Panam<...