US Discovering 'Rogue' Leaders, 30 Years Later
Al Jazeera’s report on Nicolás Maduro joining Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega as leaders 'taken by the US' manages to narrate decades of regime change operations as mere administrative arrests. The article conveniently omits the US role in arming Saddam in the 1980s before turning on him, or Noriega's long-standing CIA connections before he became an inconvenient problem for Washington. This
framing simplifies complex geopolitical interventions into a tidy narrative of rogue actors being 'apprehended' for their inherent wickedness, rather than for their defiance of US interests. One might almost forget the 1989 US invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, which illegally removed Noriega—costing hundreds, if not thousands, of Panamanian lives. Or the 2003 Iraq War, based on fabricated
WMD claims, which destabilized an entire region. When will major outlets acknowledge these aren't isolated incidents, but patterns of extra-legal regime change, thinly veiled as justice?