There are ENDLESS reasons why the US might invade a country, even tiny Panama, or wildly tiny Grenada. Most sane people wouldn't expect that to happen in a million years, but SURPRISE!
You might find the Panama invasion interesting. A superficial view from Wikipendia:
The United States Invasion of Panama, code-named Operation Just Cause, was the invasion of Panama by the United States in December 1989. It occurred during the administration of U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and ten years after the Torrijos–Carter Treaties were ratified to transfer control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama by 1 January 2000.
During the invasion, de facto Panamanian leader, general, and dictator Manuel Noriega was deposed, president-elect Guillermo Endara sworn into office, and the Panamanian Defense Force dissolved.
Background[edit]
The United States long maintained numerous military bases and a substantial garrison throughout the Canal Zone to protect the American-owned Panama Canal and to maintain American control of this strategically important area. On 7 September 1977, President of the United States Jimmy Carter and the de facto leader of Panama, General Omar Torrijos, signed Torrijos–Carter Treaties, which set in motion the process of handing over the Panama Canal to Panamanian control by the year 2000. Although the canal was destined for Panamanian administration, the military bases remained and one condition of the transfer was that the canal would remain open for American shipping.
Meanwhile, the U.S. had long-standing relations with General Noriega. Noriega served as a U.S. intelligence asset and paid informant of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1967, including the period when Bush was head of the CIA (1976–77).[6]
Noriega had sided with the U.S. rather than the USSR in Central America, notably in sabotaging the forces of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the revolutionaries of the FMLN group in El Salvador. Noriega received upwards of $100,000 per year from the 1960s until the 1980s, when his salary was increased to $200,000 per year.[7] Although he worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration to restrict illegal drug shipments, he was known to simultaneously accept significant financial support from drug dealers,[6] because he facilitated the laundering of drug money, and through Noriega they received protection from DEA investigations due to his special relationship with the CIA.[8]
Beginning in the middle of the 1980s, relations between Noriega and the United States began to deteriorate. In 1986, U.S. President Ronald Reagan opened negotiations with General Noriega, requesting that the Panamanian leader step down after he was publicly exposed in the New York Times by Seymour Hersh, and later exposed in the Iran-Contra Scandal.[9] Reagan pressured him with several drug-related indictments in U.S. courts; however, since extradition laws between Panama and the U.S. were weak, Noriega deemed this threat not credible and did not submit to Reagan's demands.[10] In 1988, Elliot Abrams and others in the Pentagon began pushing for a U.S. invasion, but Reagan refused, due to Bush's ties to Noriega through his previous positions in the CIA and the Task Force on Drugs, and their potentially negative impact on Bush's presidential campaign.[11] Later negotiations involved dropping the drug-trafficking indictments. In March 1988, an attempted coup against the government of Panama was resisted by Noriega's forces. As relations continued to deteriorate, Noriega appeared to shift his Cold War allegiance towards the Soviet bloc, soliciting and receiving military aid from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Libya.[12] American military planners began preparing contingency plans for action against Panama.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Panama
Good old "Operation Just Cause," or, more realistically, "Operation Just
Because (we can)."
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The US Invasion of Grenada:
By Stephen Zunes*
Foreign Policy In Focus
October 2003
It has been exactly twenty years since the U.S. forces invaded Grenada, ending that Caribbean island nation's four-year socialist experiment. An island nation no bigger than Martha's Vineyard, with a population that could barely fill the Rose Bowl, was defeated with relatively few American casualties. President Ronald Reagan's decision to occupy the country and replace the government with one more to his liking proved to be quite popular in the United States, with polls indicating that 63% of the public supported the invasion.
On this anniversary, it would be worth looking back at the Grenadan revolution, the U.S. invasion and its aftermath, and the important precedent it set for "regime change" through U.S. military intervention.
Grenada's Revolution
One of the tiny island nations that grew out of the British colonies in the eastern Caribbean, Grenada--like its neighbors--was populated by descendents of black African slaves. The original inhabitants, the Carib Indians, were wiped out during the early stages of colonialism. Receiving independence in 1974, the island was ruled initially by the despotic and eccentric Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy, whose murderous secret police--known as the Mongoose Squad--and his passion for flying saucers, the occult, and extra-terrestrial communication had brought him notoriety throughout the hemisphere.
On March 13, 1979, in an almost bloodless coup, a young attorney named Maurice Bishop seized power with the backing of the New Jewel Movement. They proceeded to impose an ambitious socialist program on the island inspired at least as much by Bob Marley as Karl Marx. In the next four years, while most Caribbean nations suffered terribly from worldwide recession, Grenada achieved a 9% cumulative growth rate. Unemployment dropped from 49% to 14%. The government diversified agriculture, developed cooperatives, and created an agri-industrial base that led to a reduction of the percentage of food and total imports from over 40% to 28% at a time when market prices for agricultural products were collapsing worldwide.
The literary rate, already at a respectable 85%, grew to about 98%, comparable to or higher than most industrialized countries. A free health care and secondary education system were established, the number of secondary schools tripled, and scores of Grenadans received scholarships for studies abroad. There were ambitious programs in the development of the fishing industry, handicrafts, housing, tourism, the expansion of roads and transport systems, and the upgrading of public utilities.
More:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/155/25966.html
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Ordinarily, it wouldn't seem possible a huge country would stoop this low, but as you can see, there's nothing to it. No other country is large enough to keep the U.S. from doing anything it wants, for whatever reason, and you should have learned POLITICS of the left kind can and will get people tortured, torn apart, or simply slaughtered with the greatest possible indifference.
Democrats find that offensive.
All that's needed is to dare to displease the industrial military complex in this country and its courtesans in Washington, D.C. Even the U.S. President, who had been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the world on the way out the door, in his final speech, that the military industrial complex MUST not be allowed to take over or there would be hell to pay.
Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
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